The American university faces many challenges. It has become too costly and inefficient. It fails too many students. It spends too much time and money on matters that should not be its priorities. It clings to policies and practices that need to go away. And it is too disconnected from the students and communities it must serve. This book proposes several changes to standard policies in our colleges and universities that will sharpen their missions, redirect funding to the highest priorities, improve student learning and attainment, redefine faculty engagement, slow down spending on amenities, and reduce the excesses of intercollegiate athletics. The recommended reforms remain true to the essential academic values embraced by the academy, but at the same time they recognize and respond to the new realities facing higher education.

Higher education and work consists of two papers.

Exploring the current state of relationships between public universities, government leaders, and the citizens who elect them, this book offers insight into how to repair the growing rift between higher education and its public. Higher education gets a bad rap these days. The public perception is that there is a growing rift between public universities and the elected officials who support them. In What's Public about Public Higher Ed?, Stephen M. Gavazzi and E. Gordon Gee explore the reality of that supposed divide, offering qualitative and quantitative evidence of why it's happened and what can be done about it. Critical problems, Gavazzi and Gee argue, have arisen because higher education leaders often assumed that what was good for universities was good for the public at large. For example, many public institutions have placed more emphasis on research at the expense of teaching, learning, and outreach. This university-centric viewpoint has contributed significantly to the disconnect between our nation's public universities and the representatives of the people they are supposed to be serving. But this gulf can only be bridged, the authors insist, if people at the universities take the time to really listen to what the citizens of their states are asking of them. Gavazzi and Gee draw on never-before-gathered survey data on public sentiment regarding higher education. Collected from citizens residing in the four most populous states—California, Florida, New York, and Texas—plus Ohio and West Virginia, the authors' home states, this data reflects critical issues, including how universities spend taxpayer money, the pursuit of national rankings, student financial aid, and the interplay of international activities versus efforts to create "closer to home" impact. An unflinching, no-holds-barred exploration of what citizens really think about their public universities, What's Public about Public Higher Ed? also places special emphasis on the events of 2020—including the COVID-19 pandemic and the worst racial unrest seen in half a century—as major inflection points for understanding the implications of the survey's findings.

Long argues that higher education is a moral enterprise and that, as such, it must be guided by a commitments to what is morally right and fundamentally good, not just by what is necessary in intellectual or financial endeavors.

This report presents testimony from the final 2 of a series of 44 hearings conducted in the District of Columbia and across the nation on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965, and contains the text of four bills proposed as amendments to the Higher Education Act. On the first day of testimony a panel of witnesses suggested reforms for the federal need analysis contained in the Higher Education Act. (These needs analyses are formulas used to determine student financial need for the purpose of distributing federal aid.) Among the witnesses were representatives from the administration, students, higher education institutions, teachers, aid administrators, the college Board and the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance. The second day of testimony was concerned with reform of the need analysis system and with campus safety, especially for women. A member of the House of Representatives for New Jersey, Marge Roukema, discussed restoring access to working families and middle income families and submitted an amendment designed to enact her recommendations. Next, California member of the House of Representatives, Barbara Boxer, testified in favor of amendments to the Higher Education Act titled: "Safe Campuses for Women,""Equal Justice for Women in the Courts," and "Campus Sexual Assault Victims' Bill of Rights Act of 1991." A third panel of witnesses from institutions of higher education and higher education professional associations testified on student financial need analysis. The prepared statements of the witnesses as well as of others not present are included. (JB)

Discussions on globalization now routinely focus on the economic impact of developing countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union and Latin America. Only twenty-five years ago, many developing countries were largely closed societies. Today, the growing power of “emerging markets” is reordering the geopolitical landscape. On a purchasing power parity basis, emerging economies now constitute half of the world’s economic activity. Financial markets too are seeing growing integration: Asia now accounts for 1/3 of world stock markets, more than double that of just 15 years ago. Given current trajectories, most economists predict that China and India alone will account for half of global output by 2050 (almost a complete return to their positions prior to the Industrial Revolution). How is higher education shaping and being shaped by these massive tectonic shifts? As education rises as a geopolitical priority, it has converged with discussions on economic policy and a global labor market. As part of the Routledge Studies in Emerging Societies series, this edited collection focuses on the globalization of higher education, particularly the increasing symbiosis between advanced and developing countries. Bringing together senior scholars, journalists, and practitioners from around the world, this collection explores the relatively new and changing higher education landscape.