Customer Reviews

Honoring the Trust: Quality and Cost Containment in Higher Education (JB - Anker)

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There is a contrast today between those in the academy and those outside. Those inside believe they are under pressure as never before and underappreciated. Those outside increasingly believe that those inside are both greedy and careless with their finances and also with quality. Neither perception is right. But those of us inside higher education need to rethink how we describe our finances and how we think about them. We need to also rethink our notions about how to organize. What Massy offers us is a set of very thoughtful suggestions about how to do all of those things. To think about costs and quality; technology and lots of professor contact; and a number of other ideas that each person responsible for a college or university in the country could benefit from. There is no one best way - after all colleges and universities in the US are a rich blend of types - but Massy offers ideas and models that could work in all kinds of institutions. In the year of higher education reauthorization with cost controls and new ways to regulate - this is very timely.

Massy is right on the mark with this work. His depiction of the struggle between quality and funding, research and undergraduate instruction, external control and academic freedom, and many other very real, very current issues in Higher Education is not only insightful but backed up with research and references. He has very practical advice and tools. I was so impressed with this book that I ordered several copies... for our President, the Chairman of the Board of Control, the Provost, the Vice President for Research, the Dean of Graduate Studies, etc.. The book received overwhelming glowing praise from each of them. I've no doubt this book will be on the table as we resume both strategic planning and assessment this fall.

The first half of this book is bracing and exciting; the second half is self-serving and clogged with useless jargon. At the beginning, Massy's book offers a very helpful description of how the incentives at work today in higher education undermine efforts both at cost containment and also skew the work of the faculty within the academy toward research and away from teaching. Massy is also correct to perceive that only a new structure of incentives can address these imbalances. The problem he lays out is not an easy one to solve, but it deserves a better answer than he offers here. The laborious panoply of bureaucratic interventions that he suggests -- which creak along under an even more weighty and mind-numbing array of acronyms -- is a poor response to the urgent problem of accountability in higher education. Indeed, he would add to the problem he describes by creating a new set of incentives to stimulate more of the useless "service" that drags a university's attention away from its real mission, which is to create and extend knowledge (however much Massy loathes this aspect of the academy) and to teach students. It's too bad, really, that a smart person who has such a clear-eyed perception of the problem should be co-opted by Ed-school social science and his own jet-setting Jackson-Hole think-tank until the best he can offer is a set of useless graphs and flow-charts that will waste valuable time and money and alienate "stake-holders" even further from a dysfunctional process.