Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk (review)

Declining by Degrees, edited by Richard Hersh and John Merrow, gathers college presidents, foundation officers, professors, social scientists, journalists, a novelist, and a pollster to examine pertinent issues that hinder the quality of American undergraduate education. The 15 book chapters are not organized in any particular order, but the themes that emerge throughout this volume are quite engaging. They include media coverage on postsecondary education, college admissions, curriculum reform, market-driven colleges, athletics, college choice and educational attainment, diversity and campus racial climates, philanthropy, and curriculum and campus life.

In the introduction, the editors acknowledge that they are not the first to express a deep concern about the status of undergraduate education and cite recent reports to support this point. Hersh and Merrow also posit that higher education remains mired in mediocrity because it overlooks student underachievement. While there are serious implications for the issues presented in subsequent chapters, the goal of this work "is to sound an alert and encourage a national conversation about higher education" (p. 9).

The first two chapters begin this conversation by exploring some external forces that contribute to the decline in undergraduate education. In Chapter 1, Gene Maeroff, former correspondent for the New York Times, reports that media coverage on higher education heavily lags behind that on K-12 education, thereby allowing higher education to escape scrutiny and criticism. Similarly, Deborah Wadsworth, former president of Public Agenda, a non-profit organization dedicated to unbiased public opinion research, writes about the public perception of higher education in Chapter 2. These chapters present largely ignored perspectives that could significantly impact accountability measures.

Next, James Fallows, correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, uncovers several trends that deform college admission processes. Drawing upon his personal knowledge, anecdotal accounts, and national surveys, Fallows convincingly argues that America's colleges and universities are using selectivity and prestige as crude, often destructive, proxies for quality.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine the quality of the college curriculum and liberal arts education. Jay Matthews, columnist for the Washington Post, examines the gaps between words and reality in general education requirements and reveals that many Ivy League institutions are offering liberal arts courses (such as "Ghosts, Demons, and Monsters" at Dartmouth College) that do not align with their general education statements. Carol Schneider, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, asserts that what college students learn is largely unknown and more scholarship is needed to publicize the debate on student learning outcomes. Schneider also argues that state accountability measures of liberal education remain unchallenged and makes eight recommendations to reshape the college curriculum in response.

The themes that emerge in subsequent chapters are perhaps most compelling. Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, underscores six major challenges confronting higher education: the information glut, curriculum crises, the commercialization of research, two-tier systems of faculty, concerns about quality, and challenges involving distance learning.

Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard, makes four broad suggestions to help realign colleges' and universities' dual foci on markets and individual students. Appropriately following this chapter, David Kirp, professor of Public Policy at Berkeley, points out that competition has forced higher education institutions to become market-driven businesses with the goal of leveraging institutional rankings. Kirp argues that this mode of operation will eventually impair American society's ability to compete internationally. Murray Sperber, Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Indiana University, courageously admits that his own market-driven academic leadership contributed to the corruption of quality in undergraduate education by intentionally creating an oversized introductory course taught by graduate students to generate tuition revenue.

In Chapter 10, Frank Deford, commentator on National Public Radio, explores financial priorities concerning athletics and academics and argues that the millions of dollars generated from athletics used to pay high-profile coaches and lure top athletes can also help sustain such underfunded academic endeavors as need-based scholarships.

Arthur Levine...