November 2010 Featured Book

image Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money And Failing Our Kids - And What We Can Do About It
by Andrew Hacker '51

"A timely and provocative book about a subject that affects all of us. Higher Education? is a thoroughly researched and welcome addition to the debate." Joseph E. Stiglitz '64, Professor of Economics, Columbia University; Nobel Laureate in Economics (2001)

"A powerful indictment of academic careerism. The authors are not shy about making biting judgments along the way... Higher education may be heading for a reckoning." Mark Bauerlein, The Wall Street Journal

Professor and renowned sociologist Andrew Hacker '51 along with New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus make an incisive case that the American way of higher education, now a $420 billion-per-year business, has lost sight of its primary mission: the education of young adults. Going behind the myths and mantras, they probe the true performance of the Ivy League, the baleful influence of tenure, an unhealthy reliance on part-time teachers and the super-size bureaucracies which now have a life of their own.

As Hacker and Dreifus call for a thorough overhaul of a self-indulgent system, they take readers on a road trip from Princeton to Evergreen State to Florida Gulf Coast University, revealing those facilities and institutions that are getting it right and proving that teaching and learning can be achieved - and at a much more reasonable price.