
Making Reform Work
The Case for Transforming American Higher Education
Robert Zemsky(Author)
Rutgers University Press
Published on 11. August 2009
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-8135-4591-2 (ISBN)
Description
Making Reform Work is a practical narrative of ideas that begins by describing who is saying what about American higher education, who's angry, who's disappointed, and why. Most of the pleas for changing American colleges and universities that originate outside the academy are lamentations on a small number of too often repeated themes. The critique from within the academy focuses on issues principally involving money and the power of the market to change colleges and universities. Sandwiched between these perspectives is a public that still has faith in an enterprise that it really doesn't understand. Robert Zemsky, one of a select group of scholars who participated in Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' 2005 Commission on the Future of Higher Education, signed off on the commission's report with reluctance. In Making Reform Work he presents the ideas he believes should have come from that group to forge a practical agenda for change. Zemsky argues that improving higher education will require enlisting faculty leadership, on the one hand, and, on the other, a strategy for changing the higher education system writ large.
Directing his attention from what can't be done to what can be done, Zemsky provides numerous suggestions. These include a renewed effort to help students' performance in high schools and a stronger focus on the science of active learning, not just teaching methods. He concludes by suggesting a series of dislodging events, for example, making a three-year baccalaureate the standard undergraduate degree, congressional rethinking of student aid in the wake of the loan scandal, and a change in the rules governing endowments that could break the gridlock that today holds higher education reform captive.
Making Reform Work offers three rules for successful college and university transformation: don't vilify, don't play games, and come to the table with a well-thought-out strategy rather than a sharply worded lamentation.
Directing his attention from what can't be done to what can be done, Zemsky provides numerous suggestions. These include a renewed effort to help students' performance in high schools and a stronger focus on the science of active learning, not just teaching methods. He concludes by suggesting a series of dislodging events, for example, making a three-year baccalaureate the standard undergraduate degree, congressional rethinking of student aid in the wake of the loan scandal, and a change in the rules governing endowments that could break the gridlock that today holds higher education reform captive.
Making Reform Work offers three rules for successful college and university transformation: don't vilify, don't play games, and come to the table with a well-thought-out strategy rather than a sharply worded lamentation.
More details
Edition
None edition
Language
English
Place of publication
New Brunswick NJ
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Product notice
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Paper over boards
With dust jacket
Illustrations
1
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 155 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
499 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8135-4591-2 (9780813545912)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
08/2009
Rutgers University Press
€43.99
Available for download
Person
ROBERT ZEMSKY is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania where he heads the Learning Alliance. A leading voice for American higher education reform for three decades, his major works include The Structure of College Choice, the first major study of the market for higher education; Higher Education as Competitive Enterprise, a comprehensive typology of higher education; and Remaking the American University (Rutgers University Press), a host of new, often radical ways to think about American higher education.