What's College For?: The Struggle to Define American Higher Education

by Zachary Karabell

Book Overview

President Clinton declares that a two-year education should be the right of all Americans. Congress passes a 40 billion package of tax breaks and scholarships aimed at making a degree accessible to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465091520
• ISBN13: 9780465091522
• Release Date: August 1999
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Karabell asks the right question.

Zachary Karabell set out across the nation to answer the simple,yet nebulous and all-encompassing question "What's College For?" He returned to compose an elegant, intelligent panoromic view of the widening expanse of American higher education. The book lacks real focus, but you get the feeling that Karabell wasn't really after that. He merely wanted to paint a broad view of American higher education. His work is all encompassing and, in the end, prescriptive; ultimately calling upon graduate schools to place greater emphasis on teaching and less significance on the pressure to publish. Karabell also considers the plight of adjunct faculty, the instituion of tenure, the widening gap between professors and society, the commodification of education, and the place of the humanities in the future of educaiton. It is an intelligent book which should be useful to anyone related to or considering American higher education.