The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them
448
The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them
448eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
A remarkable indictment of how misguided business policies have undermined the American higher education system.
Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL
Higher education in America, still thought to be the world leader, is in crisis. University students are falling behind their international peers in attainment, while suffering from unprecedented student debt. For over a decade, the realm of American higher education has been wracked with self-doubt and mutual recrimination, with no clear solutions on the horizon. How did this happen? In this stunning new book, Christopher Newfield offers readers an in-depth analysis of the “great mistake” that led to the cycle of decline and dissolution, a mistake that impacts every public college and university in America. What might occur, he asserts, is no less than locked-in economic inequality and the fall of the middle class.
In The Great Mistake, Newfield asks how we can fix higher education, given the damage done by private-sector models. The current accepted wisdom—that to succeed, universities should be more like businesses—is dead wrong. Newfield combines firsthand experience with expert analysis to show that private funding and private-sector methods cannot replace public funding or improve efficiency, arguing that business-minded practices have increased costs and gravely damaged the university’s value to society.
It is imperative that universities move beyond the destructive policies that have led them to destabilize their finances, raise tuition, overbuild facilities, create a national student debt crisis, and lower educational quality. Laying out an interconnected cycle of mistakes, from subsidizing the private sector to “the poor get poorer” funding policies, Newfield clearly demonstrates how decisions made in government, in the corporate world, and at colleges themselves contribute to the dismantling of once-great public higher education. A powerful, hopeful critique of the unnecessary death spiral of higher education, The Great Mistake is essential reading for those who wonder why students have been paying more to get less and for everyone who cares about the role the higher education system plays in improving the lives of average Americans.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781421421636 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2016 |
| Series: | Critical University Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Christopher Newfield is a professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class and Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980.
Christopher Newfield (LONDON, UK) is the director of research at the Independent Social Research Foundation and was formerly a distinguished professor of literature and American studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I
Holding Back Public Colleges
The Price of Privatization
The Devolutionary Cycle
Part II
Stage 1 The University Retreat from Public Goods
Stage 2 Subsidizing the Outside Sponsors
Stage 3 Large, Regular Tuition Hikes
Stage 4 The States Cut Public Funding
Stage 5 The States Cut Public Funding
Stage 6 Private Vendors Leverage Public Funds
Stage 7 Unequal Funding Cuts Attainment
Stage 8 Universities Build the Post– Middle Class
Part III
Reconstructing the Public University
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
I’ve lived through the dismantling of public higher education and watched it crush students. Chris Newfield is right—policymakers have made A Great Mistake—and the nation will pay for it for decades to come. His analysis is astute and his prescriptions for change are spot-on. Read this book slowly and carefully, and then take action.
"A wonderfully readable and vitally important book. The Great Mistake is not only an impassioned call for the refunding of public higher education in the United States but a brief for the end of neoliberalism altogether."
Public research universities are in trouble, and Christopher Newfield shows us why: they are run on false principles. In fact, sponsored research costs more than it brings in. Humanities departments yield profits that subsidize the sciences. And higher education really is a public good—in economic as well as idealistic terms. This learned and passionate book offers a thorough analysis and traces the path to recovery.
Who has paid the price for the privatization of American higher education? You have! Written with an insider’s financial detail and a scholar-citizen’s outrage, The Great Mistake is an intimate and definitive exposé of how our long experiment in corporate logic has failed the university and failed the students who leave it weighed down by debt but without the sophisticated knowledge they need and deserve. I can’t imagine a more eloquent case for higher education as a public good.
Newfield exposes thirty years of casting the private sector as the most efficient benefactor of the public good. For higher education, the result has been soaring tuitions and expenses with plummeting services, fewer faculty, and diminished educational offerings. This book gives us an action plan to reverse this Great Mistake before it becomes a tragedy that dooms our youth and our nation’s future.
A devastating account of how American public universities became caught in a ‘doom loop’ that sees today’s students paying more to get less. Toughly argued, data driven, The Great Mistake delivers a compelling economic and political case for pubic reinvestment. Every higher-education policy maker, on both sides of the Atlantic, should read it.
A wonderfully readable and vitally important book. The Great Mistake is not only an impassioned call for the refunding of public higher education in the United States but a brief for the end of neoliberalism altogether.—Michael Bérubé, coauthor of The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments
Newfield exposes thirty years of casting the private sector as the most efficient benefactor of the public good. For higher education, the result has been soaring tuitions and expenses with plummeting services, fewer faculty, and diminished educational offerings. This book gives us an action plan to reverse this Great Mistake before it becomes a tragedy that dooms our youth and our nation’s future.—Cathy N. Davidson, author of Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century
Public research universities are in trouble, and Christopher Newfield shows us why: they are run on false principles. In fact, sponsored research costs more than it brings in. Humanities departments yield profits that subsidize the sciences. And higher education really is a public good—in economic as well as idealistic terms. This learned and passionate book offers a thorough analysis and traces the path to recovery.—Anthony T. Grafton, author of Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West
I’ve lived through the dismantling of public higher education and watched it crush students. Chris Newfield is right—policymakers have made A Great Mistake—and the nation will pay for it for decades to come. His analysis is astute and his prescriptions for change are spot-on. Read this book slowly and carefully, and then take action.—Sara Goldrick-Rab, author of Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream
Who has paid the price for the privatization of American higher education? You have! Written with an insider’s financial detail and a scholar-citizen’s outrage, The Great Mistake is an intimate and definitive exposé of how our long experiment in corporate logic has failed the university and failed the students who leave it weighed down by debt but without the sophisticated knowledge they need and deserve. I can’t imagine a more eloquent case for higher education as a public good.—Bruce Robbins, author of The Beneficiary: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Inequality
A devastating account of how American public universities became caught in a ‘doom loop’ that sees today’s students paying more to get less. Toughly argued, data driven, The Great Mistake delivers a compelling economic and political case for pubic reinvestment. Every higher-education policy maker, on both sides of the Atlantic, should read it.—Helen Small, author of The Value of the Humanities
A wonderfully readable and vitally important book. The Great Mistake is not only an impassioned call for the refunding of public higher education in the United States but a brief for the end of neoliberalism altogether.