American Higher Education in Crisis?: What Everyone Needs to Know by Goldie Blumenstyk (review)

Journalists write the first draft of history. Blumen-styk’s book serves that role, giving us a snapshot of where we are right now, written from the perspective of a reporter who has been on the higher education beat for the last quarter century. She gives us informative answers for a FAQ on higher education, circa 2014. The book is literally organized around questions that someone might ask who is looking to understand a complicated story. How competitive is college admissions? What is the significance of a default rate? Is the accountability movement having an impact? Will online education make campuses obsolete? The tone is like what you would find as a side bar to the frontpage story, explaining the background and context necessary to understand the significance of what made the headlines.

After a short introduction, the four main sections of the book each tackle a big issue in higher education today. First, Blumenstyk talks about today’s college students, bringing the reader up to speed on the changing demographics of who attends higher education, the kinds of places they attend, and some of the significant policy issues (affirmative action, college attainment) that directly affect the student experience. Next, she turns to the cost of higher education, answering series of questions about who pays for college and why this has become such a pressing issue in the United States. She tackles state disinvestment in public higher education with a level of nuance that is rare in most accounts, and provides clear information on the growing debt burden that students face. In this section, the longest one of the book, Blumenstyk also dives into the other sources of revenue that colleges and universities have and explains why they are still not sufficient to keep tuition from continuing its steep rise.

The third section addresses questions of leadership in higher education. Blumenstyk tells the reader about the challenges of shared governance and how institutions are being held to account by a regulatory triad of states, accreditation agencies, and the federal government. In the fourth and final section, Blumenstyk looks to a future potentially populated with all the innovations being promoted today. The role of technology figures prominently here, but she also spends time discussing competency-based models, apprenticeships, and other alternative education approaches that seek to fundamentally alter the traditional campus.

Blumenstyk uses her questions to provide a balanced perspective on various issues. So she tells her readers about Massive Open Online Courses—MOOCs—by providing a brief history of the phenomenon and identifies why supporters think they are good and why critics push back on the hype. She talks about for-profit higher education both as a separate topic (Do for-profit colleges pose a competitive threat to traditional colleges and universities?), as well as in comparison to nonprofit and public higher education (How big is the student loan burden?)OwH. There are big questions about college costs and student diversity, for example, that would be familiar to most general observers of higher education. However, she also gets into the weeds on specialized topics such as “undermatching” and “stackable credentials.” She devotes pages to ensure the reader not only understands the problem that advocates of these approaches are trying to solve, but also the challenges associated with implementing disruptive solutions within a still-traditional higher education system. She quotes scholars, cites their research, and provides real world examples of innovation in practice. As a whole, the book demonstrates Blumenstyk’s familiarity with a wide range of current research and thinking in higher education.

As befits a reporter, Blumenstyk presents all of her answers from a neutral viewpoint. She is the omniscient observer who remains aloof from the problems and critiques she so effectively documents. One only gets a brief glimpse into her own point of view in the five-page author’s note that begins the book. It is also the only section not organized around...