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What is the value of a college degree?
The four-year college experience is as American as apple pie. So is the belief that higher education offers a ticket to a better life. But with student-loan debt surpassing the $1 trillion mark and unemployment of college graduates at historic highs, people are beginning to question that value.
In College (Un)bound, Jeffrey J. Selingo, editor at large of the Chronicle of Higher Education, argues that America’s higher education system is broken. The great credential race has turned universities into big business and fostered an environment where middle-tier colleges can command elite university-level tuition while concealing staggeringly low graduation rates, churning out graduates with few of the skills needed for a rapidly evolving job market.
Selingo not only turns a critical eye on the current state of higher education but also predicts how technology will transform it for the better. Free massive online open courses (MOOCs) and hybrid classes, adaptive learning software, and the unbundling of traditional degree credits will increase access to high-quality education regardless of budget or location and tailor lesson plans to individual needs. One thing is certain—the Class of 2020 will have a radically different college experience than their parents.
Incisive, urgent, and controversial, College (Un)bound is a must-read for prospective students, parents, and anyone concerned with the future of American higher education.
- Sales Rank: #113080 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-05-07
- Released on: 2013-05-07
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"This eye-opening book tells an important and overlooked story about how higher education in America has lost its way. This is a must-read for both policymakers and anyone struggling with the decision of choosing a college." —Geoffrey Canada, President and CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone
"For parents and their children looking for quality education, this book provides invaluable assistance by taking a clear-eyed view on what matters: excellence in teaching, a first-rate learning environment, and a commitment to preparing students for the job market." —Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank Group
"Part cultural critique, part trend-spotting, and part advice for students and parents navigating a flawed system. [College (Un)bound] delivers a powerful message to colleges themselves: the system is broken, and both their success as institutions and the future success of our workforce depends on their willingness to incorporate unbundled, lower-cost systems that allow students to customize their education." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Once in a generation, a book forces us to reconsider the fundamentals of higher education—and College (Un)bound is that book for the Wireless Generation." —David L. Marcus, author of Acceptance
"[An] eye-opening look at the state of higher education…College (Un)bound is a must-read for everyone interested in higher education and how technology will revolutionize it in the coming years." –Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity
"Jeff Selingo is one of the most respected observers of American higher education. In College (Un)bound, he shares his in-depth observations of colleges and the environment in which we function. Not all will agree with his observations, conclusions, predictions and recommendations, but all will gain from this thoughtful, well-written, provocative volume. I highly recommend it." —David J. Skorton, President of Cornell University
"You can wade through the shelf full of books on the changes coming to American colleges and universities–or you can read this one." —Mitch Daniels, President of Purdue University and former Governor of Indiana
"America's higher ed system is at a crossroads today…Selingo introduces us to the students, teachers, and entrepreneurs who are rethinking our iconic vision of what college will mean for students in the next decade." —Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class
"Among the many books examining current changes in and challenges to higher education, College (Un)bound is both the most comprehensive and the most provocative." —Rebecca Chopp, President of Swarthmore College
"Jeffrey Selingo combines solid data with compelling anecdotes to produce a richly textured account of the transformations taking place in American higher education today. By illustrating larger trends with stories about their impact on individual students and families, his book offers precisely the kind of student-centered approach that he is advocating." —Alison Byerly, president-elect, Lafayette College
“[College (Un)bound] is a book that should be read by the parents of high school seniors, high school guidance counselors, university trustees, faculty and administrators; and most important—by potential college students themselves.” —Steve Trachtenberg, former president, George Washington University
"A mixture of alarm and hope, wisdom and portending."—Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Jeffrey J. Selingo is the leading authority on higher education worldwide and editor at large for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He frequently speaks before national higher-education groups and appears regularly on regional and national radio and television programs, including NPR, PBS, ABC, MSNBC, and CBS. His writing on higher education and technology has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post. The National Magazine Awards, Education Writers Association, Society of Professional Journalists, and the Associated Press have recognized him for his work. He is a senior fellow at Education Sector, an independent education policy think tank.
From The Washington Post
Jeffrey J. Selingo is a leading authority on higher education worldwide and editor at large for the Chronicle of Higher Education. He frequently speaks before national higher education groups and appears regularly on regional and national radio and television programs on NPR, PBS, ABC, MSNBC, and CBS. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post.
Most helpful customer reviews
283 of 295 people found the following review helpful.
A (perhaps unrealistically) rosy view of the future of higher education
By Monica J. Kern
I am a former college professor who left academia a year ago, in large part because I did not care for the trends I was seeing in higher education. So when I had the opportunity to review this book, I was eager to do so, especially given the background and expertise of the author, Jeffrey Selingo, who is the Editor at Large of the The Chronicle of Higher Education. I was hoping to find a balanced and nuanced review of the changes taking place in colleges today. Instead, this book--other than the obligatory criticisms of the high tuitions and large debt loads families are assuming these days to put their children through college--presents a largely glowing portrait of where college is heading.
Take, for example, the topic of online classes, which occupies a large part of Selingo's book. This is a hot trend in colleges today for two main reasons: Colleges make a bucketload of money off them, and students love them. Selingo obviously loves them, too, and he waxes eloquently at great length about their promise for delivering convenient and inexpensive courses to students. He notes on p.99 that "a vocal slice of professors and administrators remain skeptical" of online classes, even though "every new study of online learning" arrives at essentially the same conclusion that students perform better in online courses that traditional courses. This is only one small example of sweeping statements that Selingo makes without offering any supporting evidence, and it seriously distorts the actual state of the pedagogical research, because it is emphatically NOT true that every study supports the superiority, or even equality, of online classes compared to traditional classes. For example, the Community College Research Center at Columbia University has produced multiple studies showing that community college students who enroll in online courses are much more likely to fail or drop out compared to traditional classes. Another study following over 50,000 students in Washington found that students who took more online courses were less like to transfer to four year colleges or obtain degrees.
This research is not mentioned in Selingo's book, nor does he address the issue of cheating on online classes. While there are steps that instructors can take to ensure that students do the work themselves and don't cheat on online tests, these involve considerable effort on the part of the instructor (e.g., setting up webcam surveillance of the student while she/he is taking the test, or arranging for a proctored exam to be administered), and few instructors or faculty are inclined to do so. It is entirely possible for students to receive credit for online courses where they did none of the work (google "we take your class for you" for an eye-opening display of companies openly advertising to cheat on online classes). Of course, cheating takes place in traditional classes. The difference is that the online setting makes it easier to do so.
Another disturbing aspect to the increase in online courses is that, too often, they are less rigorous than traditional classes. This is, in fact, a major reason so many students like online courses so much: They often require much less time and effort than a traditional course. I've had students tell me that they've completed an online course in two days, by going straight to the quizzes and searching the readings/lectures for key terms in the questions.
It is possible to design an online course that is rigorous, not susceptible to cheating, and offers the same intellectual challenge and exchange of ideas with faculty and peers that you can find in a traditional classroom. But such course are the exception, not the norm. And the enthusiastic endorsement of the online revolution without acknowledging these weaknesses is, in my opinion, a major flaw of the book.
The future of higher education, as Selingo sees it, is a system where students receive a more customized and flexible experience, with most students obtaining a degree through some combination of online courses, credentials offered for completing MOOCs or other "life experience," transfers across institutions, and internships. While I agree with the author that such a system would likely result in a larger number of students receiving an undergraduate degree, I don't agree that this is a future to be desired. On p. 24 the author argues that there has been a "systematic dumbing down of college campuses" and that "while the price of a degree is increasing, the amount of learning needed to get that piece of paper is moving in the opposite direction." I agree with this sentiment strongly, actually, but I also don't see the solutions embraced by Selingo as improving matters any.
That being said, the author writes well, and he does an excellent job of capturing the changing face of higher education. In particular, the first section of his book ("How We Got Here") is an excellent if disturbing summary of where higher education has gone wrong in recent decades. I just wish that the rest of the book had taken a more critical and balanced look at the unintended consequences and disadvantages of the changes he endorses so enthusiastically.
90 of 93 people found the following review helpful.
Who Are U?
By Kevin L. Nenstiel
Let us start with a statement college professors, homeschool advocates, and Jeffrey Selingo can surely agree upon: American higher education is too expensive. Budget cuts have jacked tuition, schools spend scarce resources outside the classroom, administrative roles have become patronage plums, and deregulated loans put many working-class students in debt they may never beat. The question becomes: what do we do about it?
Books like this one matter, not because they attempt to answer the question, but because they advance the debate. No 250-page book can truly address all the options. Believe me, several noble attempts have crossed my desk. But they inevitably reflect the authors' preferences for what American education should resemble. Therein, maybe, lies the problem, that American higher ed has become perilously homogenous.
Selingo, a respected educational journalist, addresses the question from multiple angles, gathering diverse sources with divergent views, reflecting real trends in recent debate. Because he addresses so much, I find myself swinging wildly. At one moment, I pump my fist and shout "Yes! Yes! Yes!" Then the next moment, I palm my face and mutter "No! No! No!" Then I ask myself the real question: why do I feel so strongly?
Education, Selingo says, has suffered in the last decade from a "race to the top" that involves little actual educational content. Highly groomed campuses and pricey sports championships attract new enrollees and alumni donations. But colleges, particularly private colleges, have offset these expenses by hiring adjunct instructors, concentrating efforts on grant-earning grad students, and packing undergrads into lecture halls of questionable pedagogical value.
We could reverse such trends by re-evaluating what education is for. The emphasis on defined disciplines and mandatory curricular trajectories is cost-effective and requires little effort from professors. Prestige majors with putative professional applications lock students into career tracks early. Instead, we should recall that employers, and society, love college grads not for their subject mastery, but for their wide-ranging ability to face new and unprecedented challenges.
I've made similar claims myself. But where the rubber meets the road, Selingo has a frustrating tendency to get giddy over unproven options. He especially shares contemporary reformers' uncritical love for technology. Selingo writes: "Every new study of online learning arrives at essentially the same conclusion: students who take all or part of their classes online perform better than those who take the same course through traditional instruction."
That's just not true. Earlier this year, Selingo's own magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote: "Online Courses Could Widen Achievement Gap Among Students." The more online courses students take, the greater their dropout risk. This especially applies to minorities, men, and students less prepared for the rigors of self-guided education. Multiple studies in multiple sources confirm this.
Consider: Selingo praises Thrun and Norvig's celebrated 2011 online Stanford course that attracted 160,000 enrollees worldwide. But according to his own numbers, this class had a completion rate of only 13.75%, barely a third of Fairleigh-Dickinson University's graduation rate, which Selingo calls "dismal." Sure, a thousand students got job referrals, but would you pay to enroll in such a class for a one-in-160 chance of professional advancement?
In fairness, Selingo repeatedly ventures in the right direction, but not far enough. He drops a one-sentence reference to St. John's College of Annapolis and Santa Fe, which is one more sentence than I've seen elsewhere. Schools like St. John's, Deep Springs, and Reed College, which soften or eliminate disciplinary divisions, graduate high numbers of desirable employees. Why not more in this direction?
Similarly, Selingo makes a fleeting reference to competencies earned through "internships outside of the classroom." I've often suggested students could benefit from non-classroom education, particularly vocational students who could learn their fields faster through old-fashioned apprenticeship. I know research exists on this, because I've read it in authors like John Taylor Gatto. But Selingo just name-drops it and walks away.
Don't mistake me. Despite my critical tone above, Selingo says plenty I think educators could stand to hear. We need to remain responsive to our students, providing personalized education that works around especially working-class students' needs. And we must eschew discipline-based "skillz drillz," instead empowering students' higher reasoning ability. I may dispute Selingo's details, but his thesis is spot on.
On balance, I do recommend this book as part of a balanced library on what necessary reforms await American higher ed. We may embrace his principles while rejecting his brass tacks. I simply encourage any would-be readers to approach this book with their critical thinking cap on.
164 of 184 people found the following review helpful.
Some good points, but mostly weak, unfocused arguments - 2.5 stars
By Dienne
"The typical state university or research institution is the amalgamation of three different business models: a consulting firm that offers solutions (the university's research function), a manufacturer that adds value to a raw material (the teaching function), and an online auction site that facilitates networks (the life and career function)."
--Jeffrey Selingo, COLLEGE UNBOUND, p. 68
So Jeffrey Selingo is telling us that students are "raw materials" which gain value through the production process of "manufacturers" so that the finished product can be "auctioned" to employers as purchasers. If you can get your head around this conceptualization of education, you will be well on your way to understanding Selingo's argument (disjointed though it may be) in this book.
Higher education is, according to Selingo, broken. The whole system needs to be revamped from nearly the top (excluding the "elite" institutions, that is) to the bottom. And Selingo has been hanging out with just the educational entrepreneurs to do the job. If it's new-fangled and glossy and sizzling, Selingo is all for it. Everything else is just a relic of the entrenched status quo of universities stuck in their "traditional" methods which no longer serve the needs of twenty-first century students. Having heard most of these same market-based, "reform" arguments made about K-12 education, I'm already on my guard.
There are so many problems with higher education that I hardly know where to start, but one of the biggest problems Selingo seems to have is the "bundling" of services at colleges. Colleges offer not only a fairly set curriculum in terms of general and major-specific courses (offered by their own institution) in order for students to be eligible for graduation, but college also seems to come as a canned experience - the dorm life, the food service, campus facilities and amenities such as athletic facilities with lazy rivers. All these extras come bundled together and that's what's driving the cost of higher education. Colleges compete in part by offering luxury residential facilities and other amenities, but they cover the costs through borrowing which gets added on to tuition and students have little or no idea what they're really paying for. Moreover, colleges are enticing students to come to their schools without disclosing the real important factors such as graduation rates and average debt loads. Many students end up not graduating and many more end up graduating with an unusable degree, and in either case they end up carrying more debt than they are able to pay off when they find themselves un- or underemployed.
If this seems like a long and rather unfocused list of grievances, it's because that's how Selingo presents his arguments. Moreover, he often claims, but rarely demonstrates, that the problems are significantly worse today than they were ten or twenty or fifty years ago. Have drop-out rates and transfer rates significantly increased over the past generation or so? Are colleges really offering more frills? I graduated in 1992, and much of what Selingo describes seem pretty familiar to me. Are students really significantly less prepared for the work world upon graduation? Seems to me the problem is simply that there is no work available.
Selingo is very captivated by solutions involving technology (especially if recommended by his favorite consulting company, Bain & Company). He is very enthusiastic about online classes, especially massive open online courses (MOOCs) and free internet based video programs such as the Khan Academy and the MIT library of course offerings. He things that colleges need to be prepared to unbundle their programs and accept (or offer) credits from any number of different sources (including life experience), but he's a little vague about the process of how those credits would be evaluated, approved and accredited to make a meaningful degree.
Selingo is also confusing technology as a tool with technology as content. He often views education as a process of pouring information into students, which can, he argues, be done just as effectively (not to mention more cheaply) online with 100,000+ students as in person with a few hundred students. He seems very focused on large lecture classes as the point of departure. But education is about a lot more than just filling students with information (as Selingo himself acknowledges in some seemingly contradictory passages), and the most valuable college courses are usually small, active participation discussion courses. Education is more about learning how to learn and having your ideas challenged by others and having to defend them, learning how to think critically and persuasively present your ideas, learning to interact with others, exploring your own interest and passions, stumbling onto new ideas and pursuits, networking and other similar inter- and intrapersonal skills. Most of the latter goals are not well suited to the online experience. Students don't learn in a vacuum. They learn in the context of relationships with peers, professors and mentors, all of whom are flawed human beings. The drawbacks to traditional education, as Selingo paints them, are often features rather than bugs. Real life is messy - there's no reason why college shouldn't be.
I'm also skeptical of Selingo's claim that in the information age, professors are no longer the "experts" in their fields. Students do have a wider range of information much more readily available, but professors, who spend their lives exploring, reading about and debating particular issues are in a much better position than students to understand the material and sort out credible facts from myth and misconception. I don't think professors will - or should - be demoted to coaches anytime soon.
I question to what extent many of the problems Selingo presents are truly problems or whether it's just the nature of higher education, and I question how much has really changed over time. Much of what he writes has a sort of, "in my day" tone to it which suggests that Selingo may be misremembering what his day was really like (his day being more recent than mine). Also, the "entrepreneurs" that Selingo is so taken with have a vested interest in seeing "problems" with higher education specifically so that they can fill "needs" and solve those very "problems" to their own profit. I'm not as familiar with the world of higher education, but we see it all the time in K-12, in which educational companies are constantly producing new curricula, standards and testing, all of which seem to show that students today are "failing", especially in international competition despite the fact that scores on the NEAP, the gold standard of testing, have been steadily rising for decades and, when controlled for poverty, the U.S. still ranks near the top on all educational measures. But success isn't as profitable as failure.
To the extent there are problems with higher education, I think they fall in basically one of two categories. The first has to do with the nature of young adults whose brains are not fully formed and who have very little exposure to or understanding of the real world or conception of what they want to do in it. Expecting people at this age to go into higher education with a career and financial goals in mind is a fool's errand (much moreso channeling eighth graders into a career academy/community college as Selingo advocates at one point). Online programs and computer software can help give students valuable data points, but the thought of computers tracking and channeling students educational and career choices from early ages is rather Orwellian, not to mention even the Chinese are moving away from such systems. We do need, as Selingo himself argues at times, to develop a college system that is more flexible and adaptive to the developmental needs of immature young people. But this needs to happen more in the form of human contact than electronic monitoring.
The other big category of problems in higher education is, indeed, as Selingo argues, the price tag and the resulting debt. I think Selingo is on target when he talks about the need for students and their families to consider - and universities to disclose - issues such as graduation rates and debt loads, especially the relationship of those factors to the financial value of the degree.
But the biggest driver of college costs to students and families has been the dramatic reduction of government - especially state - subsidies due to, as Selingo delicately puts in "budget concerns". Those budget concerns have been manufactured and hyped over decades by the Friedmanite-Reagan supply-sided model of economics which has steadily removed wealth from the public sector and the majority of poor, working class and middle class Americans into an ever smaller number of hands. Until that trend is reversed and state, local and federal governments once again have the money they need to operate, colleges and universities will continue to become more and more out of the financial reach of many, perhaps most, Americans. Sure, universities can unbundle and reduce the extras, but there are still steep, actual costs associated with providing a rich, world-class education. Forcing colleges and universities to cut back will only chip away at the overall experience, which in turn starts a downward death spiral not only for colleges, but for the American middle class. The theoretical and statistical underpinnings for "austerity" have already been demolished. The next step is for the U.S. as a country to decide to value its future and its young people enough to invest in education rather than investing in rich people. History shows us clearly which investment gives us a better return.
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