"One of the best theoretical and applied analyses of universityacademic organization and leadership in print. This book issignificant because it is not only thoughtfully developed and basedon careful reading of the extensive literature on leadership andgovernance, but it is also deliberately intended to enable theauthor to bridge the gap between theories of organization, on onehand, and practical application, on the other." --Journal of Higher Education

A Chronicle of Higher Education “Top 10 Books on Teaching” Selection Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize Constrained by shrinking budgets, can colleges do more to improve the quality of education? And can students get more out of college without paying higher tuition? Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs conclude that the limited resources of colleges and students need not diminish the undergraduate experience. How College Works reveals the surprisingly decisive role that personal relationships play in determining a student's collegiate success, and puts forward a set of small, inexpensive interventions that yield substantial improvements in educational outcomes. “The book shares the narrative of the student experience, what happens to students as they move through their educations, all the way from arrival to graduation. This is an important distinction. [Chambliss and Takacs] do not try to measure what students have learned, but what it is like to live through college, and what those experiences mean both during the time at school, as well as going forward.” —John Warner, Inside Higher Ed

Joining theory and practice, How Colleges Change unmasks problematic assumptions that university leaders and change agents typically possess, and provides research-based principles for approaching change. Featuring case studies, teaching questions, change tools, and a greater focus on scaling change, this monumental new edition offers updated content and fresh insights into understanding, leading, and enacting change. Recognizing that internal and external conditions shape and frame change processes, Kezar presents an overarching practical toolkit—a framework for analyzing change, as well as a set of theoretical perspectives to apply that framework in order to custom-design a change process, no matter the organizational challenge or context. How Colleges Change is a crucial resource for aspiring and practicing campus leaders, higher education practitioners, scholars, faculty, and staff who want to become agents of change in their own institutions.

What makes an academic leader effective? How can the myths surrounding academic leadership induce college presidents to make poor judgments? Can a college president really make a difference in whether an institution is successful in achieving its goals? In this book, Robert Birnbaum reveals the complex factors that influence the real and perceived effectiveness of academic leaders. Drawing on the results of a five-year longitudinal study by the Institutional Leadership Project, he explains how college and university leaders in various types of institutions interact and communicate, assess their own and others' effectiveness, establish goals, transmit values, and make sense of the ambiguous and dynamic organizations in which they work. And Birnbaum tells how presidents can maintain critical constituent support, increase their effectiveness, and ultimately help renew their college's values and spirit.

Higher education is in an unprecedented time of change and reform. To address these challenges, university leaders tend to focus on specific interventions and programs, but ignore the change processes and the contexts that would lead to success. Joining theory and practice, How Colleges Change unmasks problematic assumptions that change agents typically possess and provides research-based principles for approaching change. Framed by decades of research, this monumental book offers fresh insights into understanding, leading, and enacting change. Recognizing that internal and external conditions shape and frame change processes, Kezar presents an overarching practical framework that can be applied to any organizational challenge and context. How Colleges Change is a crucial resource for aspiring and practicing campus leaders, higher education practitioners, scholars, faculty, and staff who want to learn how to apply change strategies in their own institutions.

The bestselling analysis of higher education's impact, updated with the latest data How College Affects Students synthesizes over 1,800 individual research investigations to provide a deeper understanding of how the undergraduate experience affects student populations. Volume 3 contains the findings accumulated between 2002 and 2013, covering diverse aspects of college impact, including cognitive and moral development, attitudes and values, psychosocial change, educational attainment, and the economic, career, and quality of life outcomes after college. Each chapter compares current findings with those of Volumes 1 and 2 (covering 1967 to 2001) and highlights the extent of agreement and disagreement in research findings over the past 45 years. The structure of each chapter allows readers to understand if and how college works and, of equal importance, for whom does it work. This book is an invaluable resource for administrators, faculty, policymakers, and student affairs practitioners, and provides key insight into the impact of their work. Higher education is under more intense scrutiny than ever before, and understanding its impact on students is critical for shaping the way forward. This book distills important research on a broad array of topics to provide a cohesive picture of student experiences and outcomes by: Reviewing a decade's worth of research; Comparing current findings with those of past decades; Examining a multifaceted analysis of higher education's impact; and Informing policy and practice with empirical evidence Amidst the current introspection and skepticism surrounding higher education, there is a massive body of research that must be synthesized to enhance understanding of college's effects. How College Affects Students compiles, organizes, and distills this information in one place, and makes it available to research and practitioner audiences; Volume 3 provides insight on the past decade, with the expert analysis characteristic of this seminal work.

Clark Kerr once observed that "the essential conservatism of faculty members about their own affairs" dominates the governance of American college campuses. Key facets of that conservatism are evident in higher education scholarship and policy analysis. By definition, the musings of an academician on academia is not academic. Tenured faculty have a political and economic stake in the ideas that their scholarship advances about how colleges work. Faculty's financial well-being, institutional control, academic freedom, and influence on state policies are inextricably connected to how much American families, students, citizens, politicians, and policymakers support higher education. Conversely, Americans' understanding of higher education unavoidably depends on the faculty who study and publish academic works on student learning and university administration. In short, faculty has a vested interest in the areas of investigation and conclusions drawn from their own academic research on the nature of higher education.This critical history of higher education as a field of study exposes its origins in the tradition of anti-intellectualism and business enterprise in America life. Higher education scholars adopted concepts and ideological tools from the anti-New Deal and anti-centralization bent of conservative thinkers that raised impediments to the scientific study of higher learning and frustrated the accumulation of knowledge about what works for college student success. In a backlash to student protests, they redefined academic freedom as a corporate right of the faculty that betrayed the principles of higher learning for college students and characterized college administration as an organized anarchy that tended to support the status quo.Honors of Inequality demonstrates how colleges work for some, and not for others, by design. As a defense of private institutions and the elite functions of universities that prepare "the ruling class," as one scholar acknowledged, higher education scholars advocated for the transformation of the American college student loan system into a form of public subsidy to private institutions and for the elite programs on public campuses. Today, the national system of higher education financing functions as a regressive system of taxation in which many American are burdened with student loans to subsidize free college for the few.