Peter Cappelli, the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, is a prolific author, advisor to governments and organizations, researcher, scholar and influential public intellectual. He’s been called one of the worlds most important business thinkers. In 2015, he took a break from his academic and management…
If Not For Our Idiosyncrasies
Academia is an odd place, sometimes a world unto itself. Higher education’s traditions, titles and ceremonies are unique, and can be obscure and remarkably persistent. Why, after all, do students pay fees to a bursar and move a tassel on a mortar board at graduation? Why do faculty publish or perish? For those of us…
A New Design Build for Higher Education?
Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, is one of higher education’s most influential leaders. ASU has accomplished tremendous improvements under Crow’s tenure, growing enrollment, student successes, and an international profile as a global research institution. It is an institution constantly innovating and many look to ASU for ideas. Crow is a doer, a thinker…
Fail U, Higher Education, and No Retest
Charles Sykes believes that higher education has lost its way and its purpose. He is angry and sees higher ed as a gigantic scam. Sykes assembles as many complaints, criticisms and shortcomings as possible in an unremittingly shrill jeremiad, Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education. It paints a extraordinarily dire picture of higher…
Perhaps Not So Fast, Mr. Chips?
Kevin Carey’s The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere is a provocative look at a possible future for higher education. A policy expert and writer, Carey is convinced that the current state of affairs for academia is failing and that wholesale changes are just around the corner. The…
The Grind of Poverty
You may have come across Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive recently in a bookstore or referenced in the media. It’s a book by Stephanie Land, a first-person account of her experience as a poor single mother trying to get by on manual labor and government assistance. Maid has been…
Recipe For Reform
Reform or revolution? I’m thinking ways of making colleges more effective and sustainable, not Rosa Luxemburg and the end of capitalism. Some writers believe that technology or funding changes will reshape the education landscape quickly and dramatically, while others see ongoing change at a more moderate pace. In the latter camp, for an outline for…