Customer Reviews

Bright College Years: Inside the American College Today

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My soon-to-be-college bound daughter recently dropped this little book by me and before I knew it, I had read it through to the end. Somehow, I felt that this book was written especially for me, a 60's college grad who wondered just exactly what's going on behind the walls of ivy. Visiting colleges over the past couple of years made me aware that things are not quite the same as when I was in school which Matthews makes abundantly clear in her concise, well-written, and sometimes humerous prose. So how do I feel now? Am I relieved? Worried? Suicidal? Or just confused? I have a clearer picture of the overall college experience but I'm not sure that I feel any better for it. The typical campus today probably would shock a 60's Rip Van Winkle: the commercialization, students who sleep in class, the Internet, the angst, etc. This well-crafted book is fun to read, entertaining, and loaded with great little nuggets of insight. Her up-close-and-personal visits to Sinte Gleska U. in South Dakota and her tagging along with President Sanders of the College of Charleston were interesting, revealing.

The description on the back of the book calls Anne Matthew's look at higher education "affectionate," but I would say "acerbic" is more accurate. In fluid prose she relates incidents and vignettes which illustrate the contradictions and inconsistencies of higher education today, leaving the reader with a sense of the waste, irresponsibility, and hypocrisy endemic to the enterprise. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

As a college teacher I am hugely enjoying Matthew's book. Along with the recent _Alma Mater_ it gives a view of college life that I can testify is right on the money. It is very well researched by a (former?) college instructor (possibly one of the army of adjuncts that are so accurately and sadly described in her book)and win well crafted but unobtrusive prose. It has innumerable factoids and examples that I particularly enjoyed. Did you know that there is a body in upstate New York charged with overseeing academic regalia? Did you know there are 4 times as many profs today as there were students in 1900? I have a couple of cavils with the work. The most important of which is the author's dismissal of student course evaluations as insignificant. At my campus and I suspect at many others, these evaluations are (for better or worse) scrutinized with great care by provosts and tenure committees. Any faculty members with consistently low student evaluations would find themselves without a job where I teach. Secondly, though I have not finished the book,she seems to give short shrift to the agonizing debates over what I might call "the canon" though it is in fact much larger than this: what should we be reading (especially in the social sciences and lit), and so, what should we value, how should we speak to one another, but this is such a large topic perhaps it is better left largely alone. But without taking serious account of this matter, one is missing a major sea change in academia. All that aside, this is a wonderful, and easy read for anyone who wants to understand the glitzy surface and the soft underbelly of the huge enterprise called "higher education."

It's rather odd to put a word such as "dated" on this review, but much has happened since 1998 that has had an impact on universities. Items such as the internet, offshoring, the bursting of the tech bubble, the decline in civility, the rise of monstrously large athletic departments, the increases in health care, and the accelerating increases in tuition have all had their impact on universities.

Nevertheless, this book should still be required reading for many people who are going to be sending their kids off to college. Even if they don't aspire to the Ivy Leagues, there's enough skewering to go around for any university.

If you are in the top 1% of the wealthy Americans, this book might be relevant and maybe meaningful. For the rest of us, it is worthless. I wonder if the author has had any experience with how most normal people live and think. In this book, the author does the following:

*Equates community colleges with corporate-education centers because they - gasp! - focus on teaching.

*Explores the pressure a student feels by preferring to attend a college in the Midwest (Chicago) instead of the Northeast (Boston). The horror!

*Holds the elite private, Ivy leagues in high esteem (everyone goes to elite privates anyway, right?), but at the same time derides the vocationalism and creeping corporatization of colleges. Dear, it is isn't the small, Midwestern publics that are cozy with corporate America. Look in the mirror. The Ivy League professors may hold themselves as protectors of liberal values, but by receiving a paycheck from their institution, they are just as guilty as Cheney and Bush.

Bottom line - if you are sending your child to Harvard, this might be worthwhile. For the 99.5% rest of us, it makes nice kindling.

This book is a "must read" for parents about to invest a good portion of their life savings into their eager young model students who still don't know, "What I really want to do."

A lot of hard work went into this book and it shows with every insightful interview and school example. When I finished it. . .the main revelation was that higher education institutions are just like many other organizations, some great, some average, and some that should clearly think about changing to a vocational curriculum; because that's what America needs more than just another liberal arts school for our youth to hang out in until graduation.

Oh, by-the-way parents; when you finish it, hand it over to your college hopeful with the rule of finishing the book as a condition of enrollment.

Half way though my undergraduate carrer, I found this wonderful book. It conflated my experiences with those of friends at other universities to create something that is rather indicative of what it really is like to be inside the American campus today. With all its vesigal, inconoclastic irrelevance the university seems to be more important than ever to American life. This book does a masterful job explaining why... as much as it serves as a fine piece of journalism.