In this provocative volume, higher education experts explore innovative ways that colleges and universities can unbundle the various elements of the college experience while assessing costs and benefits and realizing savings. Stretching the Higher Education Dollar traces the reform continuum from incremental to more ambitious efforts. Topics include effective strategies for reallocating resources to capture efficiencies, opportunities with massive open online courses (MOOCs), and ideas for building low-cost degree pathways from the ground up. Though the pace of change in higher education is fast and furious, Stretching the Higher Education Dollar offers promising ideas for navigating the new fiscal, political, and technological environment.

Simultaneous pressures to reduce costs and increase student achievement have never been greater than they are today. Not only is cost-cutting essential in this era of tightened resources, argue Hess and Osberg, but eliminating inefficient spending is critical for freeing up resources to drive school reform. Stretching the School Dollar book brings together a dynamic group of authors—scholars, consultants, journalists, and entrepreneurs—who offer fresh insights into an issue no school or district can afford to ignore. Stretching the School Dollar is a volume in the Educational Innovations series.

Although the language of vocation was born in a religious context, the contributors in this volume demonstrate that it has now taken root within the broad framework of higher education and has become intertwined with a wide range of concerns. This volume makes a compelling case for vocational reflection and discernment in undergraduate education today, arguing that it will encourage faculty and students alike to venture out of their narrow disciplinary specializations and to reflect on larger questions of meaning and purpose. In conversation with a growing range of scholarly resources, these essays advance the cause of vocational reflection and discernment well beyond its occasional mention in general education courses and career placement offices. The book's thirteen contributors all work in higher education, but they do so as biologists and musicians, sociologists and engineers, doctors and lawyers, college presidents and deans, and scholars of history, literature, and business administration. Together, they demonstrate that vocation has an important role to play across the entire range of traditional academic disciplines and applied fields. Regardless of major, all undergraduates need to consider their current and future responsibilities, determine the stories they will live by, and discover resources for addressing the tensions that will inevitably arise among their multiple callings. Vocation across the Academy will help to reframe current debates about the purpose of higher education. It underscores the important role that colleges and universities can play in encouraging students to reflect more deeply on life's most persistent questions and to consider how they might best contribute to the common good.

This volume contains a collection of papers by economists which examine the various strategies for cutting costs and improving productivity in higher education in the United States. The dramatic increase in the cost of attending most colleges and universities in recent years has led to increasing concerns regarding college affordability. In addition, with nearly 35 percent of full-time college students failing to receive a bachelor’s degree within six years of enrolling in an institution of higher education, the productivity of colleges and universities has also been called into question. Systematic reform of higher education has intensified as a result of the large amount of public and private dollars flowing into it. The chapters in this volume, while recognizing it may be the primary source of the problem, also understand that the political forces behind the subsidization of higher education are unlikely to wane. The contributors examine several areas of possible reform from an economic perspective, including financial aid systems, athletics, and the organization of universities and university systems with an emphasis on identifying the types of reforms that are most likely to result in improvements as well as those that may make things worse. This volume will be of interest to economists, education researchers and policymakers concerned with education reform.

Also known as “free tuition” and “free college” programs, college promise programs are an emerging approach for increasing higher education attainment of people in particular places. To maximize the effectiveness of their efforts and investments, program leaders and policymakers need research-based evidence to inform program design, implementation, and evaluation. With the goal of addressing this knowledge need, this volume presents a collection of research studies that examine several categories and variations of college promise programs. These theoretically grounded empirical investigations use varied data sources and analytic techniques to examine the effects of college promise programs that have different design features and operate in different places. Individually and collectively, the results of these studies have implications for the design and implementation of promise programs if these programs are to create meaningful improvements in attainment for people from underserved groups. The authors’ efforts also provide a useful foundation for the next generation of college promise research.

Higher education expert William F. Massy’s decades as a professor, senior university officer, and consultant have left him with a passionate belief in the need for reform in America’s traditional universities. In Reengineering the University, he addresses widespread concerns that higher education’s costs are too high, learning falls short of objectives, disruptive technology and education models are mounting serious challenges to traditional institutions, and administrators and faculty are too often unwilling or unable to change. An expert microeconomist, Massy approaches the challenge of reform in a genuinely new way by applying rigorous economic principles, informed by financial data and other evidence, to explain the forces at work on universities and the flaws in the academic business model. Ultimately, he argues that computer models that draw on data from college transaction systems can help both administrators and faculty address problems of educational performance and cost analysis, manage the complexity of planning and budgeting systems, and monitor the progress of reform in nonintrusive and constructive ways. Written for institutional leaders, faculty, board members, and policymakers who bear responsibility for initiating and carrying through on reform in traditional colleges and universities, Reengineering the University shows how, working together, administrators and faculty can improve education, research, and affordability by keeping a close eye on both academic values and the bottom line. "Massy's in-depth yet highly accessible analysis is a must-read for any academic leader."—Academic Leader "William Massy is a complex, deeply knowledgeable man: half hopeless romantic about the value and high purposes of higher education and half pragmatic engineer focused on costs, efficiency, and metrics. That combination proves to be just right for this wise and insightful book."—Michael S. McPherson, The Spencer Foundation "Reengineering the University spells out the efforts that William Massy has made throughout his extraordinary career to develop models to aid academic institutions in improving their cost efficiency and academic quality. Written in clear and concise form, academic administrators and faculty concerned about the future of their institutions should read it."—Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Cornell Higher Education Research Institute "This book is a game changer. It cogently deals with the problem of long-term sustainability of universities by addressing the core problems of quality in relation to cost and margin. Massy builds a strong case for his 'reengineering tools' which any university leader would find remarkably helpful in tackling critical issues of quality-conscious cost containment."—Paula Myrick Short, University of Houston "Reengineering the University is a tough love prescription for making the nation's colleges and universities more affordable by reengineering them to be more efficient. It is Bill Massy at his best."—Robert Zemsky, Founder of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania "Only Bill Massy could provide this perspective on an extraordinary moment in higher education, offering leaders a variety of adaptive tools and methods to engage this moment and strengthen the important work of creating sustainable futures for our universities."—John J. DeGioia, Georgetown University William F. Massy, a higher education consultant, is professor emeritus of education and business administration and a former vice president and vice provost at Stanford University. The author of Honoring the Trust: Quality and Cost Containment in Higher Education, he is the former president of the Jackson Hole Higher Education Group.

How to rebuild higher education from the ground up for the twenty-first century. Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world's students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century—how would you build it from the ground up? Many have speculated about changing higher education, but Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized. The Minerva curriculum focuses on “practical knowledge” (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The book offers readers both the story of this grand and sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education.