1st Edition

College For Sale A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education

By Wesley Shumar Copyright 1997
    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    217 Pages
    by Routledge

    This text provides a framework for understanding higher education in the US and other western countries since the 1970s whereby the logic of the market place has increasingly come to dominate all arenas and, in context, the education system. The author calls this process "commodification" and he describes the transformation of universities in the US and elsewhere as they attempt to accomodate the enforced changes on their academic lives and those of their students.; The book chronicles changes with the increasing focus on career and the movement towards the instrumental functions of education; the financial crisis and the development of a more corporate approach to education; of consumption that produce universities heavy with expensive, well-equipped and powerful administrations and decreasing numbers of ever more disenfranchised faculty.

    Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Commodification; Chapter 3 Elements of Bureaucratic Identity; Chapter 4 Recent History of Higher Education; Chapter 5 Political Economy of Higher Education; Chapter 6 Imagination and the University; Chapter 7 Collective Bargaining in Higher Education; Chapter 8 Planning, Advertising and Consumption; Chapter 9 Symbolic Struggles; Chapter 10 Real Struggles; Chapter 11 Conclusion;

    Biography

    Philip Wexler, Ivor Goodson, Wesley Shumar