Surveys the changing landscape of American higher education, from academic freedom to virtual universities, from campus crime to Pell Grants, from the Student Privacy Act to student diversity. In the years following World War II, college and university enrollment doubled, students revolted, faculty unionized, and community colleges evolved. Tuition and technology soared, as did the number of first-generation, minority, and women students. These changes radically transformed the American system of postsecondary education. Today, that system is in trouble. Its aging professoriate prepares for retirement, but low academic salaries can no longer attract the best minds to replace them. A flood of corporate dollars funds commercial research, but money for basic research—the seedbed of American scientific preeminence—has dried up. Colleges and universities also face heated competition with for-profit education providers for students, faculty, and external financial support, along with the costs of providing remedial education to growing numbers of students who are unprepared for postsecondary education. Higher Education in the United States provides a comprehensive analysis of these issues and others that scholars and practitioners of higher education study, discuss, and grapple with on a daily basis.

Winner of the Outstanding Publication Award of the Post-secondary Education Division of the American Educational Research Association In Shattering the Myths, Judith Glazer-Raymo uses a critical feminist perspective to examine women's progress in higher education since 1970. She contrasts the activism of the 1970s, the passivity of the 1980s, and the ambivalence and antipathy demonstrated toward feminism in the 1990s. These waves of change, she explains, were brought about by external forces, by generational differences among women, and by intellectual and ideological struggles within the women's movement and the larger academic culture. In tracing three decades of women's progress in the academy, the author provides data from a variety of sources on women's rank, salary, employment status, and education. The book also draws on the experience of women faculty and administrators as they articulate and reflect on the social, economic, political, and ideological contexts in which they work and the multiple influences on their professional and personal lives.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.

Although the period of student protests of the 1960s and 1970s has long passed, Alain Touraine argues, in this wide-ranging and vigorous essay, that the period's problems remain with us. Higher degrees have become less and less valuable on the labor market and the demand for academic reform has become more intense. Community colleges still try to provide equal educational opportunities for the poor and the minorities, without much success. And the university has not yet resolved the conflict between being the home of impartial inquiry and research and serving constituent interests. Touraine views American higher education as a system within a definite, though changing, social context. He compares U.S. student movements with those of other countries. He is skeptical about the way Americans view the relationships between the university and what he regards as the ruling forces of the society, between knowledge and power, between production and education. He offers no facile solutions, but he presents an exciting, nontraditional analysis of the social and political forces that have shaped the modern history of higher education. In the new introduction, Clark Kerr contrasts his own views as an American observer to those of Touraine as a French intellectual. He asserts that the family, not higher education, is the most important "school" in the process of reproducing society. Kerr places more emphasis than does Touraine on the labor market, on the production functions (training of skills and advancing technology) of the vast nonelite segments of American higher education, on the long-term impacts of science in changing society, and on scholarly criticism in affecting transformations, and places less emphasis on sporadic political protests by faculty and students. He agrees with Touraine however, in his two great themes: (1) that you cannot understand the academic system unless you first understand society; and (2) that the rise of the university must be understood to understand modern society, where "knowledge is power." This volume will be important to all those interested in higher education, whether as participants or observers.