Buying the Best: Cost Escalation in Elite Higher Education - Brossura

Clotfelter, Charles T.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0691601364 ISBN 13: 9780691601366

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 2014

Riassunto

Since the early 1980s, the rapidly increasing cost of college, together with what many see as inadequate attention to teaching, has elicited a barrage of protest. Buying the Best looks at the realities behind these criticisms--at the economic factors that are in fact driving the institutions that have been described as machines without brakes. In designing his study, Charles Clotfelter examines the escalation in spending in the arts and sciences at four elite institutions: Harvard, Duke, Chicago, and Carleton. He argues that the rise in costs has less to do with increasing faculty salaries or lowered productivity than with a broad-based effort to improve quality, provide new services to students, pay for large investments in new facilities and equipment (including computers), and ensure access for low-income students through increasingly expensive financial aid.

In Clotfelter's view, spiraling costs arise from the institutions' lofty ambitions and are made possible by steadily intensifying demand for places in the country's elite colleges and universities. Only if this demand slackens will universities be pressured to make cuts or pursue efficiencies. Buying the Best is the first study to make use of the internal historical records of specific institutions, as opposed to the frequently unreliable aggregate records made available by the federal government for the use of survey researchers. As such, it has the virtue of allowing Clotfelter to draw much more realistic comparative conclusions than have hitherto been reported. While acknowledging the obvious drawbacks of a small sample, Clotfelter notes that the institutions studied are significant for the disproportionate influence they, and comparable elite institutions, exercise upon research and upon the training of future leaders. The book contains a foreword by William G. Bowen, President of the Mellon Foundation, and Harold T. Shapiro, President of Princeton University.

"Concern about ever-rising costs runs like a thread through the myriad critiques of higher education that have been published in recent years. . . . One of the great contributions of Clotfelter's work is to dismiss easy explanations for the problems that worry us. With some of the scales removed from their eyes, both those with responsibility for the future of higher education and observers who continue to expect an ever-wider scope of effort from particular colleges and universities, can now adjust their focus. Armed with this original and extremely useful analysis, we can confront more directly (and with less romanticism) the real choices before us as we seek to employ limited resources most effectively in the service of teaching and research."-William G. Bowen, President, Mellon Foundation, Harold T. Shapiro, President, Princeton University, from the foreword

Originally published in 1996.

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Recensione:

"Charles Clotfelter, an economist and former vice provost and vice chancellor at Duke University, examines the explanations for the rapid growth in spending in the nation's leading private research universities since 1976-77 . . . Buying the Best is a thought-provoking and compelling analysis, with implications well beyond its focus on higher education." --Contemporary Sociology

Contenuti:

	List of Figures
	List of Tables
	Foreword
	Preface
	List of Abbreviations
Ch. 1	The Problem of Rising Costs	1
Ch. 2	A Peculiar Institution	20
	Appendix 2.1 A Simple Financial Model of a University	51
	Appendix 2.2 Decomposing Rates of Growth in Expenditures	57
Ch. 3	Boom Times for Selective Institutions	58
	Appendix 3.1 Supplementary Tables for Chapter 3	77
Ch. 4	Patterns and Trends in Expenditures	82
	Appendix 4.1 Dealing with Interdepartmental Transfers and Recharges	117
	Appendix 4.2 Categories Used to Create Expenditure Tables	121
	Appendix 4.3 Trends in Duke Expenditures from 1976/77 to 1983/84	135
Ch. 5	The Sources of Rising Expenditures	139
	Appendix 5.1 Supplementary Tables for Chapter 5	159
Ch. 6	Administrative Functions	162
Ch. 7	The Allocation of Faculty Effort	179
	Appendix 7.1 Options for Providing Classroom Instruction	205
	Appendix 7.2 Calculation of Classroom Teaching Loads and Course Characteristics	206
	Appendix 7.3 Data on Committee Membership	216
Ch. 8	Classes and Course Offerings	218
	Appendix 8.1 Supplementary Tables for Chapter 8	240
Ch. 9	Ambition Meets Opportunity	247
	Notes to the Chapters	265
	Bibliography	285
	Index	293

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0691601364
• ISBN 13: 9780691601366
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 303