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"The typical state university or research institution is the amalgamation of three different business models: a consulting firm that offers solutions (the university's research function), a manufacturer that adds value to a raw material (the teaching function), and an online auction site that facilitates networks (the life and career function)." --Jeffrey Selingo, COLLEGE UNBOUND, p. 68 So Jeffrey Selingo is telling us that students are "raw materials" which gain value through the production process of "manufacturers" so that the finished product can be "auctioned" to employers as purchasers. If you can get your head around this conceptualization of education, you will be well on your way to understanding Selingo's argument (disjointed though it may be) in this book. Higher education is, according to Selingo, broken. The whole system needs to be revamped from nearly the top (excluding the "elite" institutions, that is) to the bottom. And Selingo has been hanging out with just the educational entrepreneurs to do the job. If it's new-fangled and glossy and sizzling, Selingo is all for it. Everything else is just a relic of the entrenched status quo of universities stuck in their "traditional" methods which no longer serve the needs of twenty-first century students. Having heard most of these same market-based, "reform" arguments made about K-12 education, I'm already on my guard. There are so many problems with higher education that I hardly know where to start, but one of the biggest problems Selingo seems to have is the "bundling" of services at colleges. Colleges offer not only a fairly set curriculum in terms of general and major-specific courses (offered by their own institution) in order for students to be eligible for graduation, but college also seems to come as a canned experience - the dorm life, the food service, campus facilities and amenities such as athletic facilities with lazy rivers. All these extras come bundled together and that's what's driving the cost of higher education. Colleges compete in part by offering luxury residential facilities and other amenities, but they cover the costs through borrowing which gets added on to tuition and students have little or no idea what they're really paying for. Moreover, colleges are enticing students to come to their schools without disclosing the real important factors such as graduation rates and average debt loads. Many students end up not graduating and many more end up graduating with an unusable degree, and in either case they end up carrying more debt than they are able to pay off when they find themselves un- or underemployed. If this seems like a long and rather unfocused list of grievances, it's because that's how Selingo presents his arguments. Moreover, he often claims, but rarely demonstrates, that the problems are significantly worse today than they were ten or twenty or fifty years ago. Have drop-out rates and transfer rates significantly increased over the past generation or so? Are colleges really offering more frills? I graduated in 1992, and much of what Selingo describes seem pretty familiar to me. Are students really significantly less prepared for the work world upon graduation? Seems to me the problem is simply that there is no work available. Selingo is very captivated by solutions involving technology (especially if recommended by his favorite consulting company, Bain & Company). He is very enthusiastic about online classes, especially massive open online courses (MOOCs) and free internet based video programs such as the Khan Academy and the MIT library of course offerings. He things that colleges need to be prepared to unbundle their programs and accept (or offer) credits from any number of different sources (including life experience), but he's a little vague about the process of how those credits would be evaluated, approved and accredited to make a meaningful degree. Selingo is also confusing technology as a tool with technology as content. He often views education as a process of pouring information into students, which can, he argues, be done just as effectively (not to mention more cheaply) online with 100,000+ students as in person with a few hundred students. He seems very focused on large lecture classes as the point of departure. But education is about a lot more than just filling students with information (as Selingo himself acknowledges in some seemingly contradictory passages), and the most valuable college courses are usually small, active participation discussion courses. Education is more about learning how to learn and having your ideas challenged by others and having to defend them, learning how to think critically and persuasively present your ideas, learning to interact with others, exploring your own interest and passions, stumbling onto new ideas and pursuits, networking and other similar inter- and intrapersonal skills. Most of the latter goals are not well suited to the online experience. Students don't learn in a vacuum. They learn in the context of relationships with peers, professors and mentors, all of whom are flawed human beings. The drawbacks to traditional education, as Selingo paints them, are often features rather than bugs. Real life is messy - there's no reason why college shouldn't be. I'm also skeptical of Selingo's claim that in the information age, professors are no longer the "experts" in their fields. Students do have a wider range of information much more readily available, but professors, who spend their lives exploring, reading about and debating particular issues are in a much better position than students to understand the material and sort out credible facts from myth and misconception. I don't think professors will - or should - be demoted to coaches anytime soon. I question to what extent many of the problems Selingo presents are truly problems or whether it's just the nature of higher education, and I question how much has really changed over time. Much of what he writes has a sort of, "in my day" tone to it which suggests that Selingo may be misremembering what his day was really like (his day being more recent than mine). Also, the "entrepreneurs" that Selingo is so taken with have a vested interest in seeing "problems" with higher education specifically so that they can fill "needs" and solve those very "problems" to their own profit. I'm not as familiar with the world of higher education, but we see it all the time in K-12, in which educational companies are constantly producing new curricula, standards and testing, all of which seem to show that students today are "failing", especially in international competition despite the fact that scores on the NEAP, the gold standard of testing, have been steadily rising for decades and, when controlled for poverty, the U.S. still ranks near the top on all educational measures. But success isn't as profitable as failure. To the extent there are problems with higher education, I think they fall in basically one of two categories. The first has to do with the nature of young adults whose brains are not fully formed and who have very little exposure to or understanding of the real world or conception of what they want to do in it. Expecting people at this age to go into higher education with a career and financial goals in mind is a fool's errand (much moreso channeling eighth graders into a career academy/community college as Selingo advocates at one point). Online programs and computer software can help give students valuable data points, but the thought of computers tracking and channeling students educational and career choices from early ages is rather Orwellian, not to mention even the Chinese are moving away from such systems. We do need, as Selingo himself argues at times, to develop a college system that is more flexible and adaptive to the developmental needs of immature young people. But this needs to happen more in the form of human contact than electronic monitoring. The other big category of problems in higher education is, indeed, as Selingo argues, the price tag and the resulting debt. I think Selingo is on target when he talks about the need for students and their families to consider - and universities to disclose - issues such as graduation rates and debt loads, especially the relationship of those factors to the financial value of the degree. But the biggest driver of college costs to students and families has been the dramatic reduction of government - especially state - subsidies due to, as Selingo delicately puts in "budget concerns". Those budget concerns have been manufactured and hyped over decades by the Friedmanite-Reagan supply-sided model of economics which has steadily removed wealth from the public sector and the majority of poor, working class and middle class Americans into an ever smaller number of hands. Until that trend is reversed and state, local and federal governments once again have the money they need to operate, colleges and universities will continue to become more and more out of the financial reach of many, perhaps most, Americans. Sure, universities can unbundle and reduce the extras, but there are still steep, actual costs associated with providing a rich, world-class education. Forcing colleges and universities to cut back will only chip away at the overall experience, which in turn starts a downward death spiral not only for colleges, but for the American middle class. The theoretical and statistical underpinnings for "austerity" have already been demolished. The next step is for the U.S. as a country to decide to value its future and its young people enough to invest in education rather than investing in rich people. History shows us clearly which investment gives us a better return.