What's College For?: The Struggle To Define American Higher Education [Paperback]

Zachary Karabell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 20, 1999

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 everyone. Almost two–thirds of high school graduates now go on to some form of higher education, and yet at the same time, those colleges and universities, inundated with a new kind of student, have been slow to respond to this revolutionary change.Zachary Karabell spent over a year traveling the country interviewing students, graduate students, faculty, and adjunct teachers, and the result is a portrait of American higher education that is neither conservative nor liberal and that needs to be taken seriously. There is a quiet revolution occurring that will—that is—changing the nature of education in this country.”Higher education is becoming mass education,” writes Karabell. The crucial clash on today’s campuses is not between traditionalists, multiculturalists, and tenured radicals, but between the competing needs and desires of students, professors, administrators, and the larger society.The overwhelming majority of today’s students are working-class people seeking education to get a job; they are not seeking a liberal education, nor planning to go on to graduate school. Most faculty members, products of the elite graduate schools that have insulated them from the needs of real-world people, are often profoundly ill-equipped to handle this changing student body. By exploring the myriad perspectives of these conflicting expectations Karabell concludes that a radical democratization of higher education is not only inevitable, it is desirable, and it will require dramatic changes in the structure and presumptions about education beyond the high school level.Topping $175 billion a year, spending for American higher education will join health care and welfare as one of the top national issues, yet there is precious little real or broad-based understanding of the issues and social forces at work. Eschewing any political agenda, yet unafraid to ask as many questions as he answers, Zachary Karabell has provided the first reasoned examination of what has become a national concern. Sure to spark intense debate, What’s College For? is a clarion call for reform.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Journalist Karabell believes that there is a widening schism between the focus of academia and the needs of society. He argues that faculty are more concerned with their research interests than their teaching responsibilities?not a new insight?and that at today's colleges older students, outside employment, athletic scholarships, and the desire to get the credential rather than acquire a base of knowledge are the main issues. He also sees the humanities as underrepresented in quality higher education. Karabell spends much time discussing the life and modus operandi of college faculty and lambastes the concepts of tenure and adjunct faculty. He sensibly concludes that there is no one model for higher education; the racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity that has always characterized the United States will inevitably be reflected in its schools. In the meantime, college faculty and administrators should look at what they are doing and why they are doing it and decide which changes must be made to redefine higher education for the new millennium. A solid survey of education today but hardly the last word on the subject.?Scott R. Johnson, Meridian Community Coll. Lib., MS
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Forget political correctness, historian Karabell urges, for here is the real revolution: "higher education is becoming mass education, and in the process is being radically democratized." As academic "guilds" and grad schools uphold an ideal of scholarship in which students are merely a necessary evil, millions of students enrolled in thousands of state universities and community colleges need kinds of teaching and support that few professors are willing or able to provide. Meanwhile, thousands of underemployed Ph.D.'s race from one poorly paid, nontenured adjunct appointment to another. Karabell talked with college students, graduate students, and professors around the country and sat in on many of their classes, and he researched recent tenure, funding, and standards battles. His prescription for the future is flexibility and experimentation, based on recognition that "no one model of academic employment and no one definition of academic work" can serve the needs of all students, all scholars, and all colleges and universities. Mary Carroll --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; New edition edition (August 20, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465091520
• ISBN-13: 978-0465091522
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,015,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars What IS college for, then?, June 4, 2000

By 

John McWhorter (New York, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What's College For?: The Struggle To Define American Higher Education (Hardcover)

Karabell addresses truly urgent concerns which have always tormented me as a young tenured college professor. He is quite right that most tenured elite faculty have little or no concern with the utter and increasing irrelevance of most academic humanities scholarship to anyone but a few hundred of their colleagues. I have also quite often been discomfitted at the contrast between the rarified world I research and teach in, nicely paid and perked to do so, and the community college classes I occasionally guest lecture in, where the stark contrast between today's American demographic reality and what I have chosen to devote my career to is painfully evident.

But Karabell's presentation is unfocused. If professors are to communicate more with the general public as he rightly urges, then editors at popular publishing houses need to give more thought to the throughline of books like this. What I glean from the book is that 1) elite professors' scholarship means nothing to the general public, who today are the heart of the student body rather than being a small white elite, 2) that we need to rethink what an education preparing students for "the world out there" really is, and that it is not lit crit theory and "There is no truth", and that 3) professors are trained to research rather than teach, and that this is perilous for undergraduate teaching as well as graduate student training. Okay. But all of this is spread over several chapters which, while interesting and tight in themselves, overlap too much as a general presentation and leave an overriding impression of a hopeless casserole of entropy and smugness that it would be impossible to cut through.

Yet this is supposed to be a policy book -- and thus I am left with the question in the title unanswered: what can we do? I do not expect 200 pages of specific policy -- but Karabell's call for universities and faculty associations to just "be open to experimentation" offers no real basis for decisive action.

Karabell appears to hold off on confronting the obvious upshot of his findings: that ALL undergraduate education ought be more vocationally geared, from the Ivies on down, and that we need to go back to the old-fashioned approaches to literature and history. I highly suspect Karabell believes something along these lines, and this would be a great book -- rather than an engaging but scattered critique -- if he had come out with this, or some more concretely constructive guidelines.

What are we to think, for example, of his vignettes of college classes where students are encouraged to opinionize from the gut rather than digest facts and think rigorously? Karabell gives the sense that this won't do -- but then what will? If this is what students like -- and they certainly do tend to chalk up classes like this as great experiences -- then what are we to make of Karabell's charge that universities are at fault in not catering to students' needs? What's college for?, indeed. We need another book to guide us to how to decide.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Karabell asks the right question., June 10, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Middlebury, Vermont) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What's College For?: The Struggle To Define American Higher Education (Hardcover)

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.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars basically worth reading, but could have been much better, August 29, 1999

By 

Sean Burke (Ketchikan, Alaska, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What's College For?: The Struggle To Define American Higher Education (Paperback)

This book asks the titular question "What's College For?", and tries to answer parts of the question from the perspectives of various parties.

This book is not, as I first feared, an opinion piece about what doe-eyed 17-year-olds should extract from their humanities education. Instead, it's the author's attempts to discover and consider opinions on the purpose of college, in the minds of various kinds of people -- society at large, undergrads (both right out of high school or "non-traditional"), grad students, tenured and untenured faculty, and so on.

The book raises many difficult questions, and points out many basic (and worsening) flaws in the US college system, flaws that are, more often than not, never raised in discussions of the system you hear elsewhere.

Karabell's method is to answer the larger question in the title via some smaller bites at it, which you could paraphrase as "what's grad school for?", "what's tenure for (and why are so few people getting it)?", "what're adjuncts for (and why do they get paid slave wages)?", "what's the history department for?", "what's research for?", "what is undergrad education for?", etc.

The point of this book is that the parties involved often have very different, even contradictory answers to these questions, reflecting different goals about every aspect of college in the US. The book succeeds in establishing this very important point, as well as in suggesting that the current situation requires readjustment (with there being multiple ways to readjust it, not just one big answer that'll suit everyone), so that everyone (undergrads, grad students, adjuncts, and faculty of various kinds) gets at least some of their goals fulfilled.

There are some notable and basically inexcusable flaws to this book:

* The question "what's college for?" immediately gets replaced by "what's college IN THE U.S. for?", as if college/university education, elsewhere, past or present, were nonexistent, or were totally irrelevant to the situation in the US.

* The author too easily goes from observing that something is true of the discipline of history in the US (he's a history professor), to assuming it's true of all academic discplines. Sometimes this works, but often it /really really/ doesn't.

* And there's some production problems -- lack of basic fact checking (producing no fewer than three imaginative ways to misspell "Cal State Northridge"), and an endnotes section that's unnecessarily hard to work and is riddled with stupid typos.

But the greatest failing of this book is that it spends too much time on questions other that what I think is the most important one: what do undergrads want/expect out of college? (And to an extent, what does society want them to want from it?) Karabell doesn't /avoid/ this question by any means -- it's what the book starts out (chs 1 and 2) discussing, and what it basically ends with (ch 9). But too much of what's inbetween is too long while contributing too little to answering the larger question in the title (notably Ch 8, "History Standards", which could have been completely deleted without detracting from the rest of the book at all).

Chapter 9, "Society in Higher Education" is so /very/ good, but so very short, that my only reaction to it was that all of the book before it should have been shelved, and replaced with more of what was in chapter 9 -- the asking of questions like: WHY do Americans think college is right for /everyone/? (In fact, do they think this?) WHY do Americans think college is necessary background for so many jobs where it's plainly not? Why do Americans get the willies at the term "vocational education", and yet flock to majors that are not basically just preparatory to the work force -- comp sci, business, accounting? Or, in fact, is this the case? I'd agree, I guess, that a business degree is basically vocational education, but is that really true of, say, comp sci degrees in general? How about medicine? Chemistry? Applied physics? Statistics? I, for one, would like to know /how many/ people are majoring in solidly academic things (Classics, say), how many people are majoring in what Karabell sees as vocational education (business), and how many people are in the grey area. And I'd like to know why they're going to school (at great expense of time and money) and why they're majoring in what they're majoring in -- i.e., how each undergrad student answers for himself the question "what is college for?".