Is a College Education Still Worth the Price? A Dean's Sobering Perspective

Is a College Education Still Worth the Price? A Dean's Sobering Perspective PDF Author: Richard B. Schwartz
Publisher: Now and Then Reader LLC
ISBN: 1937853055
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 58

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Is a College Education Still Worth the Price? A Dean's Sobering Perspective

Is a College Education Still Worth the Price? A Dean's Sobering Perspective PDF Author: Richard B. Schwartz
Publisher: Now and Then Reader LLC
ISBN: 1937853055
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 58

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Book Description


The Sacred Project of American Sociology

The Sacred Project of American Sociology PDF Author: Christian Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199377154
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Counter to popular perceptions, contemporary American sociology is and promotes a profoundly sacred project at heart. Sociology today is in fact animated by sacred impulses, driven by sacred commitments, and serves a sacred project. Sociology appears on the surface to be a secular, scientific enterprise--its founding fathers were mostly atheists. Its basic operating premises are secular and naturalistic. Sociologists today are disproportionately not religious, compared to all Americans, and often irreligious. The Sacred Project of American Sociology shows, counter-intuitively, that the secular enterprise that everyday sociology appears to be pursuing is actually not what is really going on at sociology's deepest level. Christian Smith conducts a self-reflexive, tables-turning, cultural and institutional sociology of the profession of American sociology itself, showing that this allegedly secular discipline ironically expresses Emile Durkheim's inescapable sacred, exemplifies its own versions of Marxist false consciousness, and generates a spirited reaction against Max Weber's melancholically observed disenchantment of the world. American sociology does not escape the analytical net that it casts over the rest of the ordinary world. Sociology itself is a part of that very human, very social, often very sacred and spiritual world. And sociology's ironic mis-recognition of its own sacred project leads to a variety of arguably self-destructive and distorting tendencies. This book re-asserts a vision for what sociology is most important for, in contrast with its current commitments, and calls sociologists back to a more honest, fair, and healthy vision of its purpose.

Postwar Higher Education in America

Postwar Higher Education in America PDF Author: Richard B. Schwartz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761870555
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The twenty million students now pursuing higher education in America are paying more than history, culture and the consumer price index can possibly justify, while the product they are purchasing is one that has become systematically debased. General education has been depreciated, core curricula eroded, expectations (at all levels) reduced. Slightly above half of the currently-enrolled students are graduating and only half of those are finding employment commensurate with what was once understood to be an authentic college education. Many are saddled with crippling debt, a particularly cruel reality for those who are unemployed or underemployed and unable to remove their debts via bankruptcy. Commentators now refer to the college campus as a country club or a daycare facility, one that is populated by a host of counselors, tutors and hand-holders who serve an often unprepared or underprepared student body. Remedial courses are commonplace, even with the systematic reduction of expectations. Among competing nations, international tests place our 15 year-olds no higher than 19th in three critical categories. Many now speak of "K-16 education" as our colleges replicate the atmosphere and behaviors of our grammar and high schools. How did we reach this point? How did the erosion of faculty and curricular authority occur within our institutions of higher learning? What roles were played by the radical students of the 1960s? How did our colleges of education contribute to the problem? How did corporatist administrators replace academic leaders and leverage ideologies to extend bureaucracy, attract and secure tuition dollars at any intellectual cost and create self-serving career paths for individuals running across the cracking ice of ineptitude and a lack of personal commitment? Most important, how can we reverse this process, recapture the relevant strengths of past practices, escape the gray vocationalism we now encounter at every turn and return to principles and standards that can legitimately be termed authentic? How can we save the previously-marginalized students who suffer the most within the current system? These are the questions posed by this book.

Women Administrators in Higher Education

Women Administrators in Higher Education PDF Author: Jana Nidiffer
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791491390
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
In this book Jana Nidiffer and Carolyn Terry Bashaw fill in the pieces of the story of the history of women in higher education as well as tackle contemporary topics such as the controversies surrounding women's education; the contributions of women religious and lay presidents and their use of power; the relationship of emergent leadership theory to women; the growth and development of deans of women; the role of women's professional organizations; and quandaries of provosts, physical educators, and student affairs professionals. The book illustrates the tenacious spirit and hard work of women administrators in their struggles to enhance opportunities for women on college campuses. Contributors include R. Vivian Acosta, Carolyn Terry Bashaw, Cynthia Farr Brown, Linda Jean Carpenter, Candace Introcaso, Susan R. Jones, Susan R. Komives, Sharon A. McDade, Jana Nidiffer, Joan Paul, and Karen Doyle Walton.

Sickly Vapors

Sickly Vapors PDF Author: Thomas Helling
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496854381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
The southern climate, with its heat, oppressive humidity, and stagnant marshland, accentuated disease and suffering for inhabitants of the Old South, from its early settling through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Vicious illnesses—from malaria and yellow fever to dysentery, cholera, typhoid fever, typhus, and smallpox—beleaguered those dwelling in the South and were blamed on the particular combination of air, earth, and water characteristic of those southern territories. As the rhetoric of southern sectionalism blossomed in the early nineteenth century, so did a growing feeling of southern distinctiveness in health issues. Sickly Vapors: Disease and Doctoring in the Old South is an examination of the unique circumstances of health and disease that shaped southern living and culture before, during, and after the Civil War. Through archival records, contemporary anecdotes, and scientific literature, Thomas Helling, MD, explores the intricacies of health and healthcare for an agrarian population that, by virtue of its location, was inordinately vulnerable to sicknesses and epidemics. With the influx of enslaved Africans, a new set of healthcare issues were introduced. Given the region’s peculiar climate, ethnic makeup, and customs, southern doctors adopted an attitude of distinctiveness themselves. As a result, southern medical progress became increasingly isolated from northern colleagues. The destructiveness of the Civil War finally provided the impetus for true integration with northern practices in the rapidly changing science of medicine and surgery. Yet, with the regeneration of a medical elitism in postbellum years, southern doctors clung to nostalgic notions of southern culture and southern medical distinctiveness. In this compelling volume, Helling explains how the predominant mindset of southern particularity guided regional interpretation of illness, therapeutic decisions, and medical education, foreboding a healthcare system embedded, still, with institutional racism.

Education and Schooling

Education and Schooling PDF Author: John MacBeath
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135039070
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Written in an easily accessible style, each chapter of this book illuminates deeper lying issues about the nature of schooling, learning, leadership, research, and the impact of globalisation on the lives of schools, teachers, children and families. Each of the seven themes, or lenses, through which the education system is viewed, will be of value to teachers and school leaders, as well as to academics and students on education programmes.

Resources in Education

Resources in Education PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 990

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Book Description


College

College PDF Author: Andrew Delbanco
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691246386
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The strengths and failures of the American college, and why liberal education still matters As the commercialization of American higher education accelerates, more and more students are coming to college with the narrow aim of obtaining a preprofessional credential. The traditional four-year college experience—an exploratory time for students to discover their passions and test ideas and values with the help of teachers and peers—is in danger of becoming a thing of the past. In College, prominent cultural critic Andrew Delbanco offers a trenchant defense of such an education, and warns that it is becoming a privilege reserved for the relatively rich. In describing what a true college education should be, he demonstrates why making it available to as many young people as possible remains central to America's democratic promise. In a brisk and vivid historical narrative, Delbanco explains how the idea of college arose in the colonial period from the Puritan idea of the gathered church, how it struggled to survive in the nineteenth century in the shadow of the new research universities, and how, in the twentieth century, it slowly opened its doors to women, minorities, and students from low-income families. He describes the unique strengths of America’s colleges in our era of globalization and, while recognizing the growing centrality of science, technology, and vocational subjects in the curriculum, he mounts a vigorous defense of a broadly humanistic education for all. Acknowledging the serious financial, intellectual, and ethical challenges that all colleges face today, Delbanco considers what is at stake in the urgent effort to protect these venerable institutions for future generations.

Academically Adrift

Academically Adrift PDF Author: Richard Arum
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226028577
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list. Academically Adrift holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents—all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa’s report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.

The End of College

The End of College PDF Author: Kevin Carey
Publisher: Riverhead Books
ISBN: 1594634041
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
"The rise of the internet, new technologies, and free and open higher education are radically altering college forever, and this book explores the paradigm changes that will affect students, parents, educators and employers as it explains how we can take advantage of the new opportunities ahead"--