This book reveals a comprehensive strategy to reduce high and rising medical costs. The author provides a simpler and more complete understanding of how complex medical systems work than past efforts. While others provide partial, superficial solutions, which mainly focus mainly on financial issues, this book re-examines the underlying foundations of modern medicine. Faulty knowledge misguides the medical system to perform inefficiently and expensively, in spite of the best efforts of sincere, dedicated, and competent health-care professionals. The author presents numerous winning solutions for improving medical system effectiveness. These include a complete science-based plan that applies disease prevention, health promotion, public health, primary care, scientifically verified complementary and alternative medicine, and many other approaches to improve health and reduce medical expenses. While this innovative book contains many science-based solutions, it is simple, clear, and easy to understand. For more information, see this web site: www.reducemedicalcosts.com.

Explore this controversial approach to education, its practical applications, successes, and failures in a straightforward guide that covers every facet of the issue, from for-profit schools to outsourcing of school management to vouchers. The book covers everything from school vouchers to little-known market-based educational reforms like for-profit management of public schools, commercialism in the classroom, philanthropic tuition sponsorships, faith-based charities, educational tax credits, corporate curriculum, and advertising as well as exclusive agreements between companies and schools. It includes case studies of two well-established voucher systems: the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and the private national voucher policy in Chile, a program started in l973. The book also includes a chronology, directories, bibliographies, and other reference content. Coverage of private curriculum efforts, outsourcing, the role of teacher unions, and the emergence of for-profit schools Provides a directory of organizations, associations, and government agencies involved with private choice, vouchers, and market-based educational reforms

Private higher education is perhaps the most rapidly growing segment of postsecondary education worldwide. In this collection, the authors provide a multifaceted and comparative analysis of private higher education and consider both broad issues and specific case studies. The only book currently available to lend an international focus to this subject, it examines such topics as accreditation, funding, and the impact of the market in the context of Latin American, European, and Asian higher education, and is a unique and invaluable study for researchers and policymakers alike.

Including case studies from Hungary, India, Mexico, Chile, and Malaysia, this book offers new perspectives on such key issues as the relationship of private higher education to social and economic development, competition among institutions, and the association between government and private universities. As private higher education has the potential to provide postsecondary access while limiting public expenditure, it is a significant subject that has thus far been accorded only the narrowest attention. This groundbreaking collection analyzes for the first time its implications in a variety of countries, both developed and developing.

Making sense of higher education can confound the most stellar of students. Your college education isn't just about gaining knowledge but is an experience unlike any other you'll have in life. Navigating the college environment is about learning the language-if you know how the system works, you can understand and prepare for the complexities that college presents. "College Sense" gives you just that: an insider's view of our educational culture, what to expect, and ways to react to various situations. This guide is packed with more than a hundred tips and secrets to help you make smarter decisions before, during, and after college. It's an easy-to-read, intelligent, and practical guide. Read it cover to cover, browse from topic to topic, or flip directly to answers you need most. It explores a myriad of essential topics such as how to reduce and eliminate debt, the questions that you should ask during your campus visit, and how to get the most of your college experience. It's the only book you'll ever need to help you prepare for all those things that your advisors didn't tell you about college. Page for page, "College Sense" gives you overdue advice for your college experience.

"The most recent volume in this series maintains the standard of accuracy set by its predecessors." Wilson Library Bulletin

College cost per student has been on the rise at a pace that matches ? or exceeds ? healthcare costs. Unlike healthcare, though, teaching quality has declined, and rapidly rising costs and declining quality are not trends easily forgiven by society. The College Cost Disease addresses these problems, providing a behavioral framework for the chronic cost/quality consequences with which higher education is fraught. Providing many compelling insights into the issues plaguing higher education, Robert Martin expounds upon H.R. Bowen?s revenue theory of cost by detailing experience good theory, the principal/agent problem, and non-profit status. Reputation competition dominates higher education. Students and their parents, and public opinion in general, associate higher tuition with higher quality and greater accolades; price is used as a proxy for quality only when consumers are uncertain about quality prior to purchase. Higher education services are the most complex types of ?experience goods?; a service whose quality can only be determined after a purchase has been made. Applying formal economic theory to higher education, Robert Martin examines how and why attempts to control costs are controversial and the damaging effects these controversies have on institutions? reputations. Arguing that the college access problem cannot be solved until colleges and universities find a way to control their costs, this book brings to the fore the leading ideas that will bring about much-needed budgetary reform in higher education.Governing boards, administrators and faculty members should find much to think on and learn from here; parents, students, alumni and taxpayers will find the research and conclusions alarming, though eye-opening.

This professional reference provides a comprehensive historical, theoretical, and practical overview of career centers in colleges and universities. The authors present and discuss various models of providing career services as well as ways to work with various constituent groups of clients. The volume emphasizes the pragmatics of planning, managing, and implementing career centers and provides examples of forms, policies, and strategies that have been proven to work. While the focus of the book is on practicality, the book emphasizes how theory should guide practice. The reference gives direct and proven examples of how to implement a comprehensive array of career services in a college or university. The authors address three points that are fundamental in providing career services. First, they trace the evolution of the delivery of college career services and they review various career center models. Second, they provide information and strategies that are necessary for the planning, organization, staffing, funding, and management of a college career center. Third, they review a range of services that may be provided by career centers, including counseling, assessment, computer-based guidance systems, programming, career information, and placement. Each chapter includes a list of references, and a selected bibliography concludes the work. The result is a reference bound to be of value to a wide range of student services personnel.

A discussion of the contributions made by African Americans to public and private black schools in the USA in the 19th and 20th centuries. It suggests that cultural capital from African American communities may be important for closing the gap in the funding of black schools in the 21st century.

Geoffrey Walford tackles one of the perennial issues in education policy, namely the inter-relationship of markets and equity. His discussion synthesises research findings - his own in the context of others - from over a decade examining the triangle between theory, policy (both current and recent), and practice. This is essential for library collections and individual academics and researchers.

This book reveals that, far from being the result of a groundswell of support for parental choice in American education, the origins of school vouchers are seated in identity politics, religious schooling, and educational entrepreneurship. Inserting much-needed historical context into the voucher debates, Freedom of Choice: Vouchers in American Education treats school vouchers as a series of social movements set within the context of evolving American conservatism. The study ranges from the use of tuition grants in the 1950s and early 1960s in the interest of fostering segregation to the wider acceptance of vouchers in the 1990s as a means of counteracting real and perceived shortcomings of urban public schools. The rise of school vouchers, author Jim Carl suggests, is best explained as a mechanism championed by four distinct groups-white supremacists in the South, supporters of parochial school in the North, minority advocates of community schools in the nation's big cities, and political conservatives of both major parties. Though freedom was the rallying cry, this book shows that voucher supporters had more specific goals: continued racial segregation of public education, tax support for parochial schools, aid to urban community schools, and opening up the public school sector to educational entrepreneurs. Case studies describe, explain, and compare the origins of school vouchers in four states: Louisiana, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Wisconsin Interviews with key participants in the debates over school vouchers, including Christopher Jencks and the late Milton Friedman Eight tables and graphs detail demographic and educational changes in New Orleans, Milwaukee, and Cleveland Four maps show the locations of voucher schools and programs in New Orleans, New Hampshire, Milwaukee, and Cleveland Photographs of student and parent supporters of school vouchers A bibliography of primary and secondary sources in urban history, history of education, and educational policy studies

Higher education finances lie at the crossroads in many Western countries. On the one hand, the surging demand of the past three or four decades, driven by a belief in higher education as a principal engine of social and economic advancement, has led to dramatic growth of the higher education systems in these countries. On the other hand, this growth in demand was accompanied by rapidly increasing per-student cost pressures at a time when governments seemed increasingly unable to keep pace with these cost pressures through public revenues. Hence, worldwide, the most common approach to the need for increasing revenue was to use some form or forms of cost sharing, or the shift of some of the higher educational per-student costs from governments and taxpayers to parents and students. This raises several important challenges to higher education systems. First, there is the political and social controversy associated with most forms of cost-sharing, particularly with tuition fees. Secondly, there are important issues in terms of the broad context of social policy, such as the role of families and students and the relationship that the state establishes with each of them. Third, there is the comparison of alternative instruments of cost-sharing and the direct and indirect effects of each of them, notably in terms of educational equality. Overall, underlying cost-sharing debates are fundamental questions about social choice, individual opportunities, and the role of government in society.

Drawing on an abundance of primary sources as well as on the author's extensive personal experience in the Chinese school system, this book examines the evolution of non-governmental schools in China between 1895 and 1995. The author begins with an overview of private education in pre-modern China, and discusses the growth of modern private schools in the past century as part of the Chinese people's struggle for national survival. He argues that even though the government since the Late Qing period has placed a premium on education, the government never had enough resources, and private schools filled the gap. The author maintains that the disappearance of private schools in China in the 1950s was a casualty of the Chinese revolution.

In the post-Mao era, private schools re-emerged when the nation underwent some very fundamental social and economic transformations. Being part of China's burgeoning market economy, private education has not been immune to various problems. Nevertheless, the author argues that it is private education in the 1950s that has spearheaded China's educational reform.

This book is about public education reform and the future of pubHc education funding. Given the many articles, books, and conferences that have focused on the issue of public education reform, it is reasonable to ask whether the world needs still another volume on this subject. In my defense, I would argue that, although there is a large literature on public education reform, there is precious little that tries to sketch the big picture. Too often, both in research and in practice, it is easy to lose sight of the forest, for all the focus on the individual trees. While such detailed analysis is of critical value, that value derives both from its specificity and from its ability to fit into a larger, coherent whole. Unfortunately, our understanding of the public education process is still incomplete and disconnected, particularly with regard to the connections between research, policy, and practice. This book is an attempt to step back for a moment to get one's bearings before jumping headlong back into the forest. It is my hope that this book will be of value to a wide variety of reader- researchers in departments of economics and schools of education, policy makers at all levels, and, of course, the practitioners slogging away in the trenches.

In 1993, Congress created a student loan repayment plan intended to enable high-debt graduates to accept low-income, public service jobs by reducing their loan payments and eventually forgiving part of their debts. But this Congressional initiative only helps those with catastrophically low incomes. It has failed to attract many users because, as implemented through regulations of the U.S. Department of Education, it requires payment over too long a period (25 years before forgiveness). Many students go to graduate and professional schools in pursuit of careers in public service. But they often must borrow $100,000 or more to finance their education. Their loan repayment obligations become so high that they can no longer afford to follow their ideals, and they abandon their plans to have public service careers and seek employment with corporations or firms offering high salaries. The income-contingent repayment plan should have appealed to would-be public interest lawyers, who are among the graduates with the highest debt-to-income ratios; but the plan has failed them, and Schrag explores why and how the plan should be reformed, either by Congress or by the federal administration.

The book contains a number of essays that address the recent debate on school choice and vouchers. In addition to papers that provide opinions on the role of government in education, the book offers a number of papers that analyze many of the issues employing advanced econometric techniques. Efforts have been made to balance arguments made by authors by including opposing views.

The book will contain three major parts. Part 1, Theory and Practice of Choice in Education, offers a discussion of the economic rationale for government interference in schooling and opposing views on private school choice and vouchers, whether educational production is not conducive for the creation of for-profit organizations, and a simulation study to discern, among others, the effect of choice on educational opportunity.

Part II, Are Private Schools Superior to Public Schools, contains several studies which compare achievement in public and private (especially parochial) schools, and what implications such results have for market approaches.

Part III, Empirical Studies of School Choice and Vouchers, contains research from several countries (US, Europe, Japan) concerning the success and failure of school choice programs.

It doesn't matter how many times you've bought a home; it's a purchase that you must research if you want to avoid trouble.

Author James C. Clinkscales, a licensed broker and real estate investing veteran, explains 101 ways to buy a home in this witty and straightforward guidebook. His approach makes learning about options easy and fun for buyers and others involved in the process, such as real estate agents and lawyers.

Discover the positives and negatives associated with different types of mortgages, learn how to avoid mistakes during the buying process, and steer clear of problems that the author encountered earlier in his career. Information on Federal Housing Administration programs and the history of real estate financing makes this guide even more valuable.

It's not necessary to be a mathematician to become an expert on real estate finance. Get the tools you need to own a bigger piece of the American Dream with "101 Ways to Buy a House."

Lance D. Fusarelli examines the relationship between the charter school and voucher issues: To what degree does political support for charter schools--from a coalition of teacher associations, school board groups, superintendents, and voucher advocates--slow or even stop the forces for vouchers? Or, do these coalitions, which successfully pushed charter school legislation through the legislature, actually fuel the fires of privatization? Charter schools legislation has enjoyed bipartisan support precisely because the threat of vouchers is so great. And, contrary to the strategy of voucher opponents, the spread of charter school increases, rather than alleviates, the push for vouchers.

This book advances the debate about paying "student" athletes in big-time college sports by directly addressing the red-hot role of race in college sports. It concludes by suggesting a remedy to positively transform college sports. Top-tier college sports are extremely profitable. Despite the billions of dollars involved in the amateur sports industrial complex, none winds up in the hands of the athletes. The controversies surrounding whether colleges and universities should pay athletes to compete on these educational institutions' behalf is longstanding and coincides with the rise of the black athlete at predominately white colleges and universities. Pay to Play: Race and the Perils of the College Sports Industrial Complex takes a hard look at historical and contemporary efforts to control sports participation and compensation for black athletes in amateur sports in general, and in big-time college sports programs, in particular. The book begins with background on the history of amateur athletics in America, including the forced separation of black and white athletes. Subsequent sections examine subjects such as the integration of college sports and the use of black athletes to sell everything from fast food to shoes, and argue that college athletes must receive adequate compensation for their labor. The book concludes by discussing recent efforts by college athletes to unionize and control their likenesses, presenting a provocative remedy for transforming big-time college sport as we know it. Examines the longstanding controversy regarding whether colleges must "pay to play" when it comes to being competitive in high-profile sports and how this debate intersects with perceptions of race Suggests a remedy for transforming big-time college sports that can simultaneously benefit colleges and universities, non-revenue generating sports, elite college athletes, and professional sports teams Presents provocative and insightful information for scholars and students in the fields of sociology, kinesiology, education, gender studies, black history, sports management, urban studies, communications, and labor relations as well as for current athletes, former athletes, and fans of college sports

Resource allocation decisions made by school boards, principals, and teachers are critical for they determine the adequacy and equity of resources actually made available for specific schools, educational programs and individual students. The most important resources are often concealed by aggregate state or district measures such as dollars per student. For these decisions, the most important resources are elements such as basic and supplemental staffing levels, staff time, funding amounts for textbooks and supplies, selection of new equipment (particularly technology), and support for new or renovated facilities. The authors review current practices at each important decision-making level in school districts, from the school board to the classroom. At each juncture, the findings are interpreted to reveal both the causes of the practices and their implications for improving school effectiveness. This book provides new research in helping to inform and improve resource allocation practices in schools. The general conclusion is that improvement in the resource allocation practices in education requires a shift in focus to results instead of inputs, a strong emphasis on student learning as the primary focus of decisions, and systematic evaluation of results.

This volume brings together the most current empirical research on two important innovations reshaping American education today-voucher programs and charter schools. Contributors include the foremost analysts in education policy. Of specific significance is cutting-edge research that evaluates the impact of vouchers on academic performance in the New York City, Washington, D.C., and Dayton, Ohio, school systems. The volume also looks beyond the American experience to consider the impact of market-based education as pioneered by New Zealand. Contributors also take stock of the movement's effects on public schools in particular and public opinion at-large. With thorough summaries of the existing research and the legal issues facing school choice, Charters, Vouchers, and Public Education will be key to readers who want to stay current with the burgeoning debates on vouchers and charter schools. Contributors include Terry Moe (Stanford University and the Hoover Institution), Gregg Vanourek (Yale University), Chester E. Finn Jr. (Manhattan Institute and the Fordham Foundation), Bruno V. Manno (Annie E. Casey Foundation), Michael Mintrom and David Plank (Michigan State University), Helen Ladd (Duke University), Edward Fiske (former New York Times columnist), Jay P. Greene (Manhattan Institute), William G. Howell (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Patrick J. Wolf (Georgetown University and the Brookings Institution), Mark Schneider, Paul Teske, Sara Clark, and S. P. Buckley (SUNY-Stony Brook), Robert Maranto (Villanova University), Frederick Hess (University of Virginia), Scott Milliman (James Madison University), Brett Kleitz (University of Houston), Kristin Thalhammer (St. Olaf College), Joseph Viteritti (New York University), Paul Hill (University of Washington and Brookings Institution), and Diane Ravitch (New York University and Brookings Institution).