At one time, universities educated new generations and were a source of social change. Today colleges and universities are less places of public purpose, than agencies of personal advantage. Remaking ...the American University provides a penetrating analysis of the ways market forces have shaped and distorted the behaviors, purposes, and ultimately the missions of universities and colleges over the past half-century. The authors describe how a competitive preoccupation with rankings and markets published by the media spawned an admissions arms race that drains institutional resources and energies. Equally revealing are the depictions of the ways faculty distance themselves from their universities with the resulting increase in the number of administrators, which contributes substantially to institutional costs. Other chapters focus on the impact of intercollegiate athletics on educational mission, even among selective institutions; on the unforeseen result of higher education's "outsourcing" a substantial share of the scholarly publication function to for-profit interests; and on the potentially dire consequences of today's zealous investments in e-learning. A central question extends through this series of explorations: Can universities and colleges today still choose to be places of public purpose? In the answers they provide, both sobering and enlightening, the authors underscore a consistent and powerful lesson-academic institutions cannot ignore the workings of the markets. The challenge ahead is to learn how to better use those markets to achieve public purposes.
Making Reform Work Zemsky, Robert
2009, 20090811, 2009-08-11, 20090101
eBook, Book
Making Reform Workis a practical narrative of ideas that begins by describing who is saying what about American higher educationùwho's angry, who's disappointed, and why. Most of the pleas for ...changing American colleges and universities that originate outside the academy are lamentations on a small number of too often repeated themes. The critique from within the academy focuses on issues principally involving money and the power of the market to change colleges and universities. Sandwiched between these perspectives is a public that still has faith in an enterprise that it really doesn't understand.Robert Zemsky, one of a select group of scholars who participated in Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's 2005 Commission on the Future of Higher Education, signed off on the commission's report with reluctance. InMaking Reform Workhe presents the ideas he believesshouldhave come from that group to forge a practical agenda for change. Zemsky argues that improving higher education will require enlisting faculty leadership, on the one hand, and, on the other, a strategy for changing the higher education system writ large.
Directing his attention from what can't be done to what can be done, Zemsky provides numerous suggestions. These include a renewed effort to help students' performance in high schools and a stronger focus on the science of active learning, not just teaching methods. He concludes by suggesting a series of dislodging eventsùfor example, making a three-year baccalaureate the standard undergraduate degree, congressional rethinking of student aid in the wake of the loan scandal, and a change in the rules governing endowmentsùthat could break the gridlock that today holds higher education reform captive.
Making Reform Workoffers three rules for successful college and university transformation: don't vilify, don't play games, and come to the table with a well-thought-out strategy rather than a sharply worded lamentation.
Breaking new ground in terms of both its subject matter and its format, Communicate for a Change is an accessible and engaging catalyst that will kick-start subsequent deliberations.
It is no surprise that college tuition and student debt are on the rise. Universities no longer charge tuition to simply cover costs. They are market enterprises that charge whatever the market will ...bear. Institutional ambition, along with increasing competition for students, now shapes the economics of higher education. In The Market Imperative , Robert Zemsky and Susan Shaman argue that too many institutional leaders and policymakers do not understand how deeply the consumer markets they promoted have changed American higher education. Instead of functioning as a single integrated industry, higher education is in fact a collection of segmented and more or less separate markets. These markets have their own distinctive operating constraints and logics, especially regarding price. But those most responsible for federal higher education policy have made a muck of the enterprise, while state policymaking has all but disappeared, the victim of weak imaginations, insufficient funding, and an aversion to targeted investment. Chapter by chapter, The Market Imperative draws on new data developed by the authors in a Gates Foundation–funded project to describe the landscape: how the market for higher education distributes students among competing institutions; what the job market is looking for; how markets differ across the fifty states; and how the higher education market determines the kinds of faculty at different kinds of institutions. The volume concludes with a three-pronged set of policies for making American higher education mission centered as well as market smart. Although there is no one-size-fits-all approach for reforming higher education, this clearly written book will productively advance understanding of the challenges colleges and universities face by providing a mapping of the configuration of the market for an undergraduate education.
The College Stress Test Zemsky, Robert; Shaman, Susan; Baldridge, Susan Campbell
Johns Hopkins University Press,
2020, 2020-02-25
eBook, Book
In The College Stress Test, Robert Zemsky, Susan Shaman, and Susan Campbell Baldridge present readers with a full, frank, and informed discussion about college and university closures. Drawing on the ...massive institutional data set available from IPEDS (the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System), they build a stress test for estimating the market viability of more than 2,800 undergraduate institutions. They examine four key variables—new student enrollments, net cash price, student retention, and major external funding—to gauge whether an institution is likely to consider closing or merging with another school. They also assess student body demographics to see which students are commonly served by institutions experiencing market stress. The book's appendix includes a powerful do-it-yourself tool that institutions can apply, using their own IPEDS data, to understand their level of risk.
The book's underlying statistical analysis makes clear that closings will not be nearly as prevalent as many prognosticators are predicting and will in fact impact relatively few students. The authors argue that just 10 percent or fewer of the nation's colleges and universities face substantial market risk, while 60 percent face little or no market risk. The remaining 30 percent of institutions, the authors find, are bound to struggle. To thrive, the book advises, these schools will need to reconsider the curricula they deliver, the prices they charge, and their willingness to experiment with new modes of instruction.
The College Stress Test provides an urgently needed road map at a moment when the higher education terrain is shifting. Those interested in and responsible for the fate of these institutions will find in this book a clearly defined set of risk indicators, a methodology for monitoring progress over time, and an evidence-based understanding of where they reside in the landscape of institutional risk.
Readers of Making Sense of the College Curriculum expecting a traditional academic publication full of numeric and related data will likely be disappointed with this volume, which is based on stories ...rather than numbers. The contributors include over 185 faculty members from eleven colleges and universities, representing all sectors of higher education, who share personal, humorous, powerful, and poignant stories about their experiences in a life that is more a calling than a profession. Collectively, these accounts help to answer the question of why developing a coherent undergraduate curriculum is so vexing to colleges and universities. Their stories also belie the public’s and policymakers’ belief that faculty members care more about their scholarship and research than their students and work far less than most people.  
The Rain Man Cometh-Again Zemsky, Robert
Academy of Management perspectives,
02/2008, Letnik:
22, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
On Oct 16, 1983, U.S. News and World Report published its first rankings of institutions. In 2007 the U.S. News rankings celebrated their 25th anniversary, having become an American icon. They've ...also spawned a veritable tribe of rankings telling Americans about the best law schools and graduate schools and medical schools and more. Like the calculations of the autistic savant Dustin Hoffman played in Rain Man, the rankings were invested with arithmetic precision but the numbers themselves were largely devoid of meaning. The editors responsible for the rankings issues seemingly did not understand what their statistical staff and consultants were doing -- or why. Despite the muddle caused by the rankings, two important aspects of the problem are now clearer. First, the U.S. News rankings are here to stay and the story those numbers tell will remain largely the same. At the same time, calls for an alternative to the U.S. News rankings will increase in both frequency and fervor.
Massive open online courses (MOOCs ) are much less in the news today--but that does not mean that they are no longer important. Rather, their importance now derives from what they demonstrated about ...the fractured nature of college curricula. Almost all MOOCs were one-offs--a single instructor/performer and a well-bounded subject. MOOCs almost never connected either to another MOOC or to another aspect of the curriculum--and that is the issue. What the fascination with MOOCs demonstrated was just how easily it was to conceive of the college curriculum as a series of largely disconnected events. What is needed instead is a commitment to rebuilding the connective tissue that once made college curricula in general and general education curricula in particular substantially more than the sum of their disconnected parts.
Massive open online courses (moocs) are much less in the news today—but that does not mean that they are no longer important. Rather, their importance now derives from what they demonstrated about ...the fractured nature of college curricula. Almost allmoocs were one-offs—a single instructor/performer and a well-bounded subject.moocs almost never connected either to anothermoocor to another aspect of the curriculum—and that is the issue. What the fascination withmoocs demonstrated was just how easily it was to conceive of the college curriculum as a series of largely disconnected events. What is needed instead is a commitment to rebuilding the connective tissue that once made college curricula in general and general education curricula in particular substantially more than the sum of their disconnected parts.
The Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education too often focused on what's wrong with American higher education and too seldom offered real solutions to vexing problems. ...Commission member Robert Zemsky takes a look at how two issues in particular, high costs and inadequate student learning, might have been better addressed by the Spellings commission.
