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  • DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Education
  • John W. Presley, Professor
Anya Kamenetz . DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Education. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010. 196 pp. Paper: $14.95. ISBN: 978-1-60358-234-6.

Anya Kamenetz, a staff writer for Fast Company magazine, has written for The New York Times and for The Village Voice, which nominated her for a Pulitzer Prize for a series called "Generation Debt." In 2006, Kamenetz published her first book, with that same title (New York: Penguin, 2006). DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Education is her most recent commentary on U.S. higher education.

The most compelling sections of DIY U continue the arguments of Generation Debt. Nine of 10 high school graduates hope to attend college, and President Barak Obama has promised Congress that "we will provide the support necessary for all young Americans to complete college" (quoted p. viii). However, the facts of the matter are quite different. With college dropout rates of 50% and student loan debt totalling more than $730 million, the average debt for each college graduate today is over $23,000.

According to Kamenetz, these numbers indicate that American colleges and universities are failing at their task—and failing in the trust the public and the government have placed in them. Her critique is so stinging that several very intelligent readers have felt that Kamenetz is clearly so hostile to American higher education that the title of the book is a pun: "DIY U" could be either "Do It Yourself University" or pronounced as "Die, You!"

In her first chapters, a sharply critical history of American higher education, she describes how the Higher Education Act of 1965 and its 1972 additions of the Pell Grant and the Guaranteed Student Loan became what have been called the country's "most impressive, revered, and successful welfare program" (p. 13). Yet is it really a successful approach? First of all—and obviously—student loans must be repaid, and often on repayment schedules that stress the budget of a recent graduate collecting his or her first paycheck on the job. Second, Pell Grants are available for only a third of all students. Kamenetz then points out that few, if any, new colleges appeared to serve the new students who could afford college after 1972. Instead, she says, state colleges grew into state universities dealing with increased enrollment with ever-larger lecture classes and part-time instructors. "They scaled up by watering down," Kamenetz accuses (p. 14).

Leave aside the difficulty of proving that any of these factors "watered down" the college experience for these new students. Little research shows decreased learning in this era; and while no one would argue that adjunct faculty have not been increasingly exploited, research showing that instruction by adjuncts is inferior to that of other instructors is scarce.

Kamenetz undercuts her own argument when she later admits that these were not, in reality, the only responses to enrollment numbers. "Public community colleges opened at the rate of one a week between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s" (p. 14). In 1950, enrollment in community colleges was 168,043 students; by 1970, enrollment was well over 2 million, and of course as tuition has risen for four-year college, so has community college enrollment (p. 14). In making these claims, Kamenetz gives the reader a first glimpse into the paradoxical elitism which pervades the book. Does Kamenetz believe that this growth was part of the "watering down"? If so, she has joined a small group of people for whom community colleges have been at best, an afterthought—writers like Alexander Astin in his early work and historians of higher education like John Thelin.

Kamenetz's bias and elitism are more clearly stated when she summarizes, "In practice, expanding educational access has always meant lowering the entry bar to meet the students where they are, academically" (p. 14). She traces this lowering of [End Page 714] the bar from the founding colleges in New England, to the opening of the Morrill agricultural and mechanical schools, to the G.I. Bill and its...

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