This perceptive and cogent account draws on key data and firsthand observations to tell the story of the small college in America. Defined as institutions that enroll between 500 and 3,000 full-time students, small colleges number about six hundred in the United States. Many are thriving, while some—whether through low enrollment, ballooning debt, or simple misfortune—face uncertain futures. Informed by his own experiences as a teacher and administrator, Samuel Schuman sketches the history and development of these institutions; then focuses on their current conditions and future possibilities. Administrators, faculty, and researchers will appreciate Schuman's insight into institutional choices and their consequences. Old Main is an essential book for anyone who shares Schuman's conviction that small colleges occupy a central place in American higher education.

Featuring many personal accounts, the twenty-four essays in this collection explore the challenges and possibilities confronting those, especially women, who combine parenting and academic work. Written by a diverse group of educators who present a real-world variety of situations, the collection also includes ideas for change at the individual, interpersonal, policy, and system levels.

The steady expansion of college enrollment rates over the last generation has been heralded as a major step toward reducing chronic economic disparities. But many of the policies that broadened access to higher education—including affirmative action, open admissions, and need-based financial aid—have come under attack in recent years by critics alleging that schools are admitting unqualified students who are unlikely to benefit from a college education. In Passing the Torch, Paul Attewell, David Lavin, Thurston Domina, and Tania Levey follow students admitted under the City University of New York’s “open admissions” policy, tracking its effects on them and their children, to find out whether widening college access can accelerate social mobility across generations. Unlike previous research into the benefits of higher education, Passing the Torch follows the educational achievements of three generations over thirty years. The book focuses on a cohort of women who entered CUNY between 1970 and 1972, when the university began accepting all graduates of New York City high schools and increasing its representation of poor and minority students. The authors survey these women in order to identify how the opportunity to pursue higher education affected not only their long-term educational attainments and family well-being, but also how it affected their children’s educational achievements. Comparing the record of the CUNY alumnae to peers nationwide, the authors find that when women from underprivileged backgrounds go to college, their children are more likely to succeed in school and earn college degrees themselves. Mothers with a college degree are more likely to expect their children to go to college, to have extensive discussions with their children, and to be involved in their children’s schools. All of these parenting behaviors appear to foster higher test scores and college enrollment rates among their children. In addition, college-educated women are more likely to raise their children in stable two-parent households and to earn higher incomes; both factors have been demonstrated to increase children’s educational success. The evidence marshaled in this important book reaffirms the American ideal of upward mobility through education. As the first study to indicate that increasing access to college among today’s disadvantaged students can reduce educational gaps in the next generation, Passing the Torch makes a powerful argument in favor of college for all.

In an era when college football coaches frequently command higher salaries than university presidents, many call for reform to restore the balance between amateur athletics and the educational mission of schools. This book traces attempts at college athletics reform from 1855 through the early twenty-first century while analyzing the different roles played by students, faculty, conferences, university presidents, the NCAA, legislatures, and the Supreme Court. _x000B__x000B_Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform also tackles critically important questions about eligibility, compensation, recruiting, sponsorship, and rules enforcement. Discussing reasons for reform--to combat corruption, to level the playing field, and to make sports more accessible to minorities and women--Ronald A. Smith candidly explains why attempts at change have often failed. Of interest to historians, athletic reformers, college administrators, NCAA officials, and sports journalists, this thoughtful book considers the difficulty in balancing the principles of amateurism with the need to draw income from sporting events.

Plagiarism takes an in-depth look at the history of plagiarism in higher education in light of today’s Web-based plagiarism detection services. Challenging the widespread assumption that plagiarism is a simple matter of student cheating or scriptural error, Bill Marsh argues that today’s teachers and educational institutions may be cheating themselves and their students in pursuing quick-fix solutions to the so-called epidemic of student plagiarism. When students submit papers cribbed from materials found on the Web or purchase research papers from Internet paper mills, these acts of sedition must also be recognized, for better or worse, as examples of new-media composition techniques. Examining Web-based plagiarism detection services and software such as Glatt, EVE, Plagiarism-Finder, and Turnitin.com, Marsh contends that these services regulate writing and reading practices in ways consistent with precomputer, even preindustrial, efforts to manage and refine human behavior. As he weaves together print history, education, rhetoric, and communication theory, Marsh shows that the rules governing plagiarism and the proper use of borrowed materials have their origins in early intellectual property law, in the reading practices of twelfth-century monks, and the precepts of medieval alchemy. Through an examination of these prescholastic models, this book calls for a revised approach to academic writing in computer-mediated environments.

Policy and Performance in American Higher Education presents a new approach to understanding how public policy influences institutional performance, with practical insight for those charged with crafting and implementing higher education policy. Public institutions of higher learning are called upon by state governments to provide educational access and opportunity for students. Paradoxically, the education policies enacted by state legislatures are often complex and costly to implement, which can ultimately detract from that mission. Richard Richardson, Jr., and Mario Martinez evaluate the higher education systems of five states to explain how these policies are developed and how they affect the performance of individual institutions. The authors compare the higher education systems of New Mexico, California, South Dakota, New York, and New Jersey and describe the difficulty of enforcing state policies amid increasing demands for greater efficiency and accountability. In the process they identify the "rules in use"—rules that are central to the coherence and performance of higher education systems—that administrators apply to meet organizational goals within the constraints of changing, sometimes conflicting federal and state policies. Incorporating rich data from seven years of observations, interviews, and research, Richardson and Martinez offer a clear comparative framework for understanding state higher education.

Comprehensive treatment of the current crises faced by public institutions of higher education in the United States.