Remaking the American University: Market-Smart and Mission-Centered (review)

Contemporary higher education institutions repeatedly find themselves at the receiving end of harsh criticism from students, lawmakers, and the general public for neglecting their traditional missions and pursuing strategies that seem to both distance the academy from its primary stakeholders (students) and breed an internally fragmented culture based on personal advancement. What happened to make the picture of academe change so dramatically in just 40 years' time?

The short answer is that changing social and economic conditions in the early 1970s gave birth to the "marketization" of higher education; and like a misunderstood child, it has wreaked havoc on the system every since. Markets, for all of their woes, are here to stay but can the strong mission orientation of the past still be preserved? Is it possible for institutions to be both market-smart and mission-centered? This is the fundamental question that Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy seek to answer in Remaking the American University.

The first four chapters lay the foundation for the rest of the book. The authors begin by tying the current state of affairs to the development of the system following World War II. They then introduce the "administrative lattice" and "academic ratchet" as a way to explain the expansion of institutional bureaucracy and gradual shift in faculty members' time toward research and away from undergraduate education. Chapter 3 describes how the market for undergraduate education can be likened to an escalating "arms race" while the fourth chapter offers a primer on the theory of nonprofit provision and its most important corollary, cross-subsidization.

The middle section of the book deals with how emphasizing markets and eschewing mission have shaped the way institutions now operate. Chapter 5 explores the implications of marketization on publishing academic research. Chapter 6 discusses intercollegiate athletics but with a twist—by looking at how the scholar-athlete who still persists in the Ivy League shapes enrollment decisions. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the institutions' education side by examining market innovation (or lack thereof) as it applies to the overblown hype surrounding e-learning and consider how market incentives can put teaching on an equal footing with research.

The last section maps the road ahead. Chapter 9 deals with education quality and how it can be increased in a market without rewards while Chapter 10, on access, argues that a more integrated K–16 system is needed to redress problems with recruiting and retaining truly "at risk" students. In the last two chapters, the authors call for more dialogue on how public policy can meet the challenges of a system whose future expansion will be heavily influenced by private resources. They also discuss the role that institutional leaders must undertake if things are to truly change.

Overall the book offers much to both the lay reader and to academics unfamiliar with higher education economics. The topics it covers are timely, and the authors' analyses pull together a wide range of difficult economic concepts and present them in a way that is easy to understand. The historical background alone makes this book a worthwhile read. To my knowledge, it makes a first contribution in tying contemporary economic research on the functioning and failures of higher education markets to its critical roots. And while the authors immediately point out that much of the work presented here has shown up in other forms, the chapters on commercial publishing and e-learning are novel additions to the mainstream economic topics. The discussion behind why higher education elected to outsource academic publishing in the first place and the consequences of doing so arguably provides one of the finest examples in the entire book of how wedded universities are to marketization and how murky the market is for nonprofits.

If I have one general criticism, it is the overwhelming attention to what are abusively termed "medallion" institutions. For a book that purports to...