Higher Education?

How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It

Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus

St. Martin's Griffin

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A quarter of a million dollars. It’s the going tab for four years at most top-tier colleges. Why does it cost so much and is it worth it?
 
In this provocative investigation, the renowned sociologist Andrew Hacker and New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus make an incisive case that the American way of higher education—now a $420 billion-per-year business—has lost sight of its primary mission: the education of our young people. They probe the true performance of the Ivy League, the baleful influence of tenure, an unhealthy reliance on part-time teachers, and supersized bureaucracies which now have lives of their own.

Hacker and Dreifus take readers from Princeton and Harvard to Evergreen State, revealing those institutions that need to adjust their priorities and others that are getting it right, proving that learning can be achieved—and at a much more reasonable price. Higher Education? is a wake-up call and a call to arms.

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Higher Education?
PART 1WHAT WENT WRONG?* 1 *THE WORLD OF THE PROFESSORIATEA few years back, the political science department of Queens College, part of the City University of New York, put out a call for an assistant professor to teach basic classes in American government. In a tight job market, this was an unusually good opportunity. The position was "tenure track," which meant that in six years' time it could lead to a lifetime appointment. The pay was above average.

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Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus

ANDREW HACKER is the author of the bestselling book Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, and writes regularly for the New York Review of Books and other publications. He is a professor at Queens College.  CLAUDIA DREIFUS writes for the “Science Times” section of the New York Times and teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. They live in New York City.

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Claudia Dreifus

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Higher Education?
How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It
Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus

Trade Paperback

Trade Paperback
St. Martin's Press
St. Martin's Griffin
August 2011
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780312573430
ISBN10: 031257343X
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 304 pages
$14.99
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Hardcover
Henry Holt and Co.
Times Books
August 2010
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780805087345
ISBN10: 0805087346
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 288 pages
$26.00
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Henry Holt and Co.
Times Books
August 2010
e-Book Agency
ISBN: 9781429943390
ISBN10: 1429943394
288 pages
$9.99
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