2021 ASHE/CIHE Award for Significant Research on International Higher Education U.S. Power in International Higher Education explores how internationalization in higher education is not just an educational endeavor, but also a geopolitical one. By centering and making explicit the role of power, the book demonstrates the United States’s advantage in international education as well as the changing geopolitical realities that will shape the field in the future. The chapter authors are leading critical scholars of international higher education, with diverse scholarly ties and professional experiences within the country and abroad. Taken together, the chapters provide broad trends as well as in-depth accounts about how power is evident across a range of key international activities. This book is intended for higher education scholars and practitioners with the aim of raising greater awareness on the unequal power dynamics in internationalization activities and for the purposes of promoting more just practices in higher education globally.

Christopher C. Langdell (1826-1906) is one of the most influential figures in the history of American professional education. As dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1895, he conceived, designed, and built the educational model that leading professional schools in virtually all fields subsequently emulated. In this first full-length biography of the educator and jurist, Bruce Kimball explores Langdell's controversial role in modern professional education and in jurisprudence. Langdell founded his model on the idea of academic meritocracy. According to this principle, scholastic achievement should determine one's merit in professional life. Despite fierce opposition from students, faculty, alumni, and legal professionals, he designed and instituted a formal system of innovative policies based on meritocracy. This system's components included the admission requirement of a bachelor's degree, the sequenced curriculum and its extension to three years, the hurdle of annual examinations for continuation and graduation, the independent career track for professional faculty, the transformation of the professional library into a scholarly resource, the inductive pedagogy of teaching from cases, the organization of alumni to support the school, and a new, highly successful financial strategy. Langdell's model was subsequently adopted by leading law schools, medical schools, business schools, and the schools of other professions. By the time of his retirement as dean at Harvard, Langdell's reforms had shaped the future model for professional education throughout the United States.

Although schools of law, medicine, and business are now highly respected, schools of education and the professionals they produce continue to be held in low regard. In Ed School, Geraldine Jonçich Clifford and James W. Guthrie attribute this phenomenon to issues of academic politics and gender bias as they trace the origins and development of the school of education in the United States. Drawing on case studies of leading schools of education, the authors offer a bold, controversial agenda for reform: ed schools must reorient themselves toward teachers and away from the quest for prestige in academe; they must also adhere to national professional standards, abandon the undergraduate education major, and reject the Ph.D. in education in favor of the Ed.D.

Believing that the primary purpose of professional education is to prepare practitioners, the authors consider variables that affect professional practice. Emphasis is the key role and techniques of experiential education for effective transfer of learnig to practice in medicine, law, social work, and management. Other variables that impact cost and quality of services include cost and length of professional education; specialization, selection, and promotion of faculty; role of research; use of paraprofessionals; and assessment of professional education. Conclusions go beyond education, for the four professions discussed in detail, to challenge current objectives and practices in all professional education. The major conclusion is that professional learning for practice needs to be improved and points to the importance of utilizing and developing experiential education as the key learning approach. Other counterproductive effects of current professional education practices identified are: a tendency to consider isolated problems and ignore clients' needs, inadequate continuing graduate professional education, oversupply of professionals in many areas, failure of many professionals to keep up with changing theory and practice, and overly expensive and poor research as the result of using the same institutions for both. Corrective action is suggested in each case.