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College: What It Was, Is, And Should Be (2012)

by Andrew Delbanco(Favorite Author)

3.54 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0691130736 (ISBN13: 9780691130736)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Princeton University Press

review 1: Delbanco holds out hope for the ideal of what college is imagined to be: a time for intellectual exploration, learning how to learn, and learning about oneself. This ideal he admits has always been mainly honored in the breach, but today is only possible at a shrinking elite fraction of the ever-growing mass higher education enterprise, and even then the opportunity is only seized upon by a fraction of the students at these places. He admits that giving everybody the ivy-clad ideal is financially impossible, and that the ideal in any event may serve mainly as a social legitimation mechanism for the current social order, and yet he hangs onto the humanist hopes at the heart of it.
review 2: I believe that the "take away" from this book was that higher education ... morehas changed in that the reason people pursue a credential is related more to career than for the sake of learning and becoming a better person through the pursuit of knowledge. It was a quick read and the author never really made a distinct point about higher education, as promised in the title. This look at the state of higher education did not have the shrill tone of many related books published recently. I read this book for an upcoming discussion with colleagues. Hopefully this discussion will, if not better illuminate the ideas in the book, spark discussion around the changes in the mission of higher education. less

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