This book diagnoses the problems in American higher education in the 2010s and describes principal reforms that must occur in combination in order for it to remain a vital enterprise: a fundamental recasting of federal financial aid; new mechanisms for better channeling the competition among colleges and universities; recasting the undergraduate curriculum; and a stronger, more collective faculty voice in governance that defines not why, but how the enterprise must change.
Using a theoretical framework developed by Professor Akira Arimoto to describe recent changes in the Japanese system of higher education, Robert Zemsky discusses what happens when higher education becomes the norm in a society and when this massification of a higher education system gives way to post-massification. Zemsky demonstrates how, in the current era of post-massification, American higher education is a system under duress, at a time when the economy, shifting demographics, and political lassitude have forced a restructuring of the enterprise. He examines trends such as the price-income squeeze, where the economic returns to college have fallen while the cost has risen; the bifurcation of institutions into outlets and medallions; the reduced demand for young workers; and the dynamics of local labor and education markets. Zemsky concludes that, once the market for college graduates becomes saturated in a locality, the boundary between massification and post-massification is crossed, leading to a restratification of both educational attainment and economic advantage.
Discusses massification and post-massification of the higher educational system; examines such trends as the price-income squeeze, bifurcation of institutions into medallions and outlets, reduced demand for young workers, and dynamics of local labor and education markets; since 1975, chiefly; US. Theoretical framework based on Professor Akira Arimoto's analysis of recent changes in the Japanese higher education system.
The principal question we now face as a discipline may well be, "Can history recapture its romantic past?" The roots of that tradition are well known, extending back to Bancroft, Motley and Parkman, who came to the practice of history principally as men of letters. Avid readers of Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, these first American historians saw in their craft the obligation not to analyze history, but to recreate it, thus forging what Richard Hofstadter called their "imaginative relation with the past.…What they worked for was experience not philosophy… the moral drama of history was told in pictorial terms. The effort at historical discipline… rested upon the insatiable quest for the right, the relevant detail.…The technical… side of the work of these men came primarily to this: facts were valued not so much as 'evidence,' as proofs in some analytic scheme, but as veracious details for the recreation of some experience."
