With the economy in a downturn, there have been questions asked lately about the value of a college degree– will kids really earn more than they would have without that piece of paper or will they instead start their adult life with a minimum-wage job and a lot of student loan debt.
(We’ll leave aside for now the matter of the value of a college education as a way to becoming fulfilled in non-economic ways.)
Now comes a new book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus –Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It — in which they argue that the people who benefit most from colleges are the people who work there.
Mark Bauerlein– who teaches at Emory University– reviews the book in the Wall Street Journal:
In “Higher Education?” Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus …offer statistics, anecdotes and first-person accounts— concerning tuition, tenure and teaching loads, among much else—to draw up a powerful, if rambling, indictment of academic careerism. The authors are not shy about making biting judgments along the way.
For all the high-minded talk, Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus conclude, colleges and universities serve the people who work there more than the parents and taxpayers who pay for “higher education” or the students who so desperately need it.
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