American Universities In A Global Market

In higher education, the United States is the preeminent global leader, dominating the list of the world’s top research universities. But there are signs that America’s position of global leadership will face challenges in the future, as it has in other realms of international competition. American Universities in a Global Market addresses the variety of issues crucial to understanding this preeminence and this challenge. The book examines the various factors that contributed to America’s success in higher education, including openness to people and ideas, generous governmental support, and a tradition of decentralized friendly competition. It also explores the advantages of holding a dominant position in this marketplace and examines the current state of American higher education in a comparative context, placing particular emphasis on how market forces affect universities. By discussing the differences in quality among students and institutions around the world, this volume sheds light on the singular aspects of American higher education.

A colorful history of US research universities, and a market-based theory of their global success. American education has its share of problems, but it excels in at least one area: university-based research. That’s why American universities have produced more Nobel Prize winners than those of the next twenty-nine countries combined. Economist Miguel Urquiola argues that the principal source of this triumph is a free-market approach to higher education. Until the late nineteenth century, research at American universities was largely an afterthought, suffering for the same reason that it now prospers: the free market permits institutional self-rule. Most universities exploited that flexibility to provide what well-heeled families and church benefactors wanted. They taught denominationally appropriate materials and produced the next generation of regional elites, no matter the students’—or their instructors’—competence. These schools were nothing like the German universities that led the world in research and advanced training. The American system only began to shift when certain universities, free to change their business model, realized there was demand in the industrial economy for students who were taught by experts and sorted by talent rather than breeding. Cornell and Johns Hopkins led the way, followed by Harvard, Columbia, and a few dozen others that remain centers of research. By the 1920s the United States was well on its way to producing the best university research. Free markets are not the solution for all educational problems. Urquiola explains why they are less successful at the primary and secondary level, areas in which the United States often lags. But the entrepreneurial spirit has certainly been the key to American leadership in the research sector that is so crucial to economic success.

At one time, universities educated new generations and were a source of social change. Today colleges and universities are less places of public purpose, than agencies of personal advantage. Remaking the American University provides a penetrating analysis of the ways market forces have shaped and distorted the behaviors, purposes, and ultimately the missions of universities and colleges over the past half-century. The authors describe how a competitive preoccupation with rankings and markets published by the media spawned an admissions arms race that drains institutional resources and energies. Equally revealing are the depictions of the ways faculty distance themselves from their universities with the resulting increase in the number of administrators, which contributes substantially to institutional costs. Other chapters focus on the impact of intercollegiate athletics on educational mission, even among selective institutions; on the unforeseen result of higher education's "outsourcing" a substantial share of the scholarly publication function to for-profit interests; and on the potentially dire consequences of today's zealous investments in e-learning. A central question extends through this series of explorations: Can universities and colleges today still choose to be places of public purpose? In the answers they provide, both sobering and enlightening, the authors underscore a consistent and powerful lesson-academic institutions cannot ignore the workings of the markets. The challenge ahead is to learn how to better use those markets to achieve public purposes.

This book provides an analysis of university missions over time and space. It starts out by presenting a governance framework focusing on the demands on universities set by regulators, market actors and scrutinizers. It examines organizational structures, population development, the fundamental tasks of universities, and internal governance structures. Next, the book offers a discussion of the idea and role of universities in society, exploring concepts such as autonomy and universality, and the university as a transformative institute. The next four chapters deal with the development of universities from medieval times, through the Renaissance, towards the research universities in the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. The following five chapters analyse recent developments of increasing external demands manifested through evaluations, accreditations and rankings, which in turn have had effects on the organization of universities. Topics discussed include markets, managers, globalization, consumer models and competition. The book concludes by a discussion and analysis of the future challenges of universities.

Universities and Globalization: To Market, To Market examines the operations of power and knowledge in international education under conditions of globalization, with a focus on the three biggest exporters of higher education--the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. An interdisciplinary approach based on the core social sciences is used to explore the power relations that shape global education networks. The role of nation-states in creating the conditions for education markets and the desire for a Westernized template of international education in the postcolonial world is discussed. The volume offers a sophisticated attempt to recast international education as a series of geopolitical and geoeconomic engagements that transcend simple supply and demand dynamics. Engaging with the theoretical debates about education and globalization, this book examines global cultural "flows" and boundary crossings, the cultural economy of education networks, and the possibilities for supra-territorial subjectivities. International education markets are examined from the perspectives of both first world producers and postcolonial consumers. By investigating how first world universities imagine and enact the global in their marketing practices, the expressions of cultural diversity valued by education markets, and the types of individual and institutional subjectivities merging from markets, Universities and Globalization: To Market, To Market offers students, faculty, administrators, marketing consultants, and others who work in the area a highly nuanced account of the global relations fostered by education markets. This original, critical examination of the forms and cultural politics of international education is a significant contribution to the field.

A radical blueprint for reinventing American higher education. America’s research universities consistently dominate global rankings but may be entrenched in a model that no longer accomplishes their purposes. With their multiple roles of discovery, teaching, and public service, these institutions represent the gold standard in American higher education, but their evolution since the nineteenth century has been only incremental. The need for a new and complementary model that offers broader accessibility to an academic platform underpinned by knowledge production is critical to our well-being and economic competitiveness. Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University and an outspoken advocate for reinventing the public research university, conceived the New American University model when he moved from Columbia University to Arizona State in 2002. Following a comprehensive reconceptualization spanning more than a decade, ASU has emerged as an international academic and research powerhouse that serves as the foundational prototype for the new model. Crow has led the transformation of ASU into an egalitarian institution committed to academic excellence, inclusiveness to a broad demographic, and maximum societal impact. In Designing the New American University, Crow and coauthor William B. Dabars—a historian whose research focus is the American research university—examine the emergence of this set of institutions and the imperative for the new model, the tenets of which may be adapted by colleges and universities, both public and private. Through institutional innovation, say Crow and Dabars, universities are apt to realize unique and differentiated identities, which maximize their potential to generate the ideas, products, and processes that impact quality of life, standard of living, and national economic competitiveness. Designing the New American University will ignite a national discussion about the future evolution of the American research university.

Engages a topic of pressing concern for government, business, and education leaders around the world: the race to establish 'world-class' universities. Some herald the globalization of higher education as the key to a dynamic and productive 'knowledge society.' Others worry that modern universities have come to resemble multinational corporations.

In the twenty-first century, the global community constantly strives to bring structure and order to the world through strategic means. From the highest levels of governments and militaries to multilateral institutions, NGOs, and corporations, a strategy for the future of a company, region, country, or even the world is tantamount to success. Yet few understand what strategy actually is and how it can be developed, planned, and implemented. Strategy for the Global Market combines a fundamental study of the theory of strategy with its practical applications to provide a new approach to the global emerging market. Due to the technological transformations in communications and transportation, and the birth and development of both the global community and the global marketplace over the past twenty years, the world’s population and corporations are in much closer contact with their counterparts across the globe than ever before. This has led to increasing competition and even rivalries. Understanding the strategic environment, as well as solving problems either through amicable means or conflict, requires the powerful instrument of strategy to remain efficient and to triumph. Features of this book include: Methodology and practical recommendations for all stages of developing and implementing strategy. A comprehensive guide with explanations and descriptions, for the preparation and orderly compilation of all necessary strategy documents. Real-world examples taken from corporate, government, and military strategizing practices in emerging market countries and the global marketplace. This book should be on the desk of every national, regional, and military leader, corporate executive, manager, and student of strategy.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Dream Is Over tells the extraordinary story of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, created by visionary University of California President Clark Kerr and his contemporaries. The Master Plan’s equality of opportunity policy brought college within reach of millions of American families for the first time and fashioned the world’s leading system of public research universities. The California idea became the leading model for higher education across the world and has had great influence in the rapid growth of universities in China and East Asia. Yet, remarkably, the political conditions supporting the California idea in California itself have evaporated. Universal access is faltering, public tuition is rising, the great research universities face new challenges, and educational participation in California, once the national leader, lags far behind. Can the social values embodied in Kerr’s vision be renewed?

In an academy squeezed hard by formidable pressures, what is the future of the faculty? Over the past 70 years, the American university has become the global gold standard of excellence in research and graduate education. The unprecedented surge of federal research support of the postWorld War II American university paralleled the steady strengthening of the American academic profession itself, which managed to attract the best and brightest educators from around the world while expanding the influence of the "faculty factor" throughout the academic realm. But in the past two decades, escalating costs and intensifying demands for efficiency have resulted in a wholesale reshaping of the academic workforce, one marked by skyrocketing numbers of contingent faculty members. Extending Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein's richly detailed classic The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers, this important book documents the transformation of the American faculty—historically the leading global source of Nobel laureates and innovation—into a diversified and internally stratified professional workforce. Drawing on heretofore unpublished data, the book provides the most comprehensive contemporary depiction of the changing nature of academic work and what it means to be a college or university faculty member in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The rare higher education study to incorporate multinational perspectives by comparing the status and prospects of American faculty to teachers in the major developing economies of Europe and East Asia, The Faculty Factor also explores the redistribution of academic work and the ever-more diverse pathways for entering into, maneuvering through, and exiting from academic careers. Using the tools of sociology, anthropology, and demography, the book charts the impact of waves of technological change, mass globalization, and the severe financial constraints of the last decade to show the impact on the lives and careers of those who teach in higher education. The authors propose strategic policy recommendations to extend the strengths of American higher education to retain leadership in the global economy. Written for professors, adjuncts, graduate students, and academic, political, business, and not-for-profit leaders, this data-rich study offers a balanced assessment of the risks and opportunities posed for the American faculty by economic, market-driven forces beyond their control.