Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids

On July 26th I wrote a blog entry titled Administrative Glut about an article in the Education Life section of the New York Times. It was a preview of this book:

Dreifus, Claudia, and Andrew Hacker. Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids, and What We Can Do About It. New York: Times Books, 2010.

About a day later Claudia Dreifus commented on my entry. I even made friends with her on Facebook. Since I work for a university, I just had to buy the book. I wasn’t going to wait to get it from a library. :) It is not my objective to provide a thorough book review. One such review may be found at http://tinyurl.com/25vfj6s

I always use a personal approach in my journal entries. ( I really don’t like the term blog)

All universities including NJIT have characteristics of a business. They make money from tuition dollars, the government, and grants. They obvious spend money and owe it to students to do it responsibly. I am going to think in terms of a cost benefit relationship.

NJIT was not at all mentioned in this book. Our university has an office of communications that provides information to the public of the positive attributes of NJIT. None of their efforts reached Dreifus or Hacker. We are just not a household name. But on the other hand on page 105 the authors cited a few engineering schools for abysmal teaching:

• Stevens Institute of Technology


• RPI


• Georgia Tech


• Illinois Institute of Technology


• Cal Tech

I know some very fine teachers at NJIT who put that responsibility ahead of research. One of the major themes of the book is that faculty are more concerned about research and publishing.

I tend to disagree with a statement on page 106 saying that engineering should be only a graduate offering. True, many undergraduate engineers change majors early in their college career. I think it may because they fall in love with the word “engineer” and don’t know what the profession entails. All engineers must have rigorous background in the sciences, thus the curriculum is often 5 years. Many students need more than that time frame.

As a librarian I am given a budget to purchase books. I must use those funds carefully to acquire books that support the curriculum at NJIT. No librarian wants to purchase books that will just sit on the shelf for years. I am also glad that my position is not tenure track, as many academic library positions are. This way I do not have to worry about publishing and can be more concerned about providing resources and teaching students how to use them.

I highly recommend that anyone working for a university read this book. University administration owe it to the students, faculty, staff, alumni, government, and grant funding organizations to spend money responsibly.