Why we need to stop wasting public funds on education Despite being immensely popular-and immensely lucrative-education is grossly overrated. Now with a new afterword by Bryan Caplan, this explosive book argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As only to forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for average workers, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy. Romantic notions about education being "good for the soul" must yield to careful research and common sense-The Case against Education points the way.

This collection reveals a recurring theme in the author's work over almost three decades: that the preoccupation in policy, commentary, research and practice with who gets into higher education has led to a corresponding failure to cast a critical eye over what, where and when they get the higher education offer. It seems that potential students are expected to fit-in with HE culture, rather than think about how HE might change to fit-in with them. On offer is a collection of the author's works, spanning much of his professional working life, covering issues relevant to widening access to success in higher education and for a wide-ranging audience. Some chapters offer conference speeches and keynotes; others are blogs or chapters in books. One is even a speech to an audience from the UK House of Lords delivered originally within the Parliament precincts. Together they paint a picture of the prevailing issues and concerns of the widening access agenda over twenty-five years. A recurring call throughout is the need for greater international collaboration, a need that has indeed grown in importance as the conversation on widening access and success has progressed. Some would say that this is due, in no small measure, to the work of this critical thinker and practitioner.

On the 200th anniversary of the birth of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the 40th anniversary of the award of Brunel University's Royal Charter, Made in Brunel: Making our Mark celebrates the university's reputation as a centre of excellence for applied engineering and design in Europe.The 2007 edition of Made in Brunel, entitled Making Our Mark is about students making an impression, distinguishing themselves and raising the standard and perceptions of what rigorous engineering and design disciplines can achieve. It is a recognition that the UK generally and London specifically, are the world-wide hub for translating engineering and design innovation into enterprise and wealth creation.

For almost a century, big-time college athletics has been a wildly popular but consistently problematic part of American higher education. The challenges it poses to traditional academic values have been recognized from the start, but they have grown more ominous in recent decades, as cable television has become ubiquitous, commercial opportunities have proliferated, and athletic budgets have ballooned. In the second edition of his influential book Big-Time Sports in American Universities, Clotfelter continues to examine the role of athletics in American universities, building on his argument that commercial sports have become a core function of the universities that engage in them. Drawing on recent scandals on large-scale college campuses and updates on several high-profile court cases, Clotfelter brings clear economic analysis to the variety of problems that sports raise for university and public policy, providing the basis for the continuation of constructive conversations about the value of big-time sports in higher education.

The straightforward guide to surviving and thriving in law school

Every year more than 40,000 students enter law school and at any given moment there are over 125,000 law school students in the United States. Law school’s highly pressurized, super-competitive atmosphere often leaves students stressed out and confused, especially in their first year. Balancing life and schoolwork, passing the bar, and landing a job are challenges that students often need help facing. In Law School For Dummies, former law school student Rebecca Fae Greene uses straight talk, sound advice, and gentle humor to help students sort through the swamp of coursework and focus on what’s important–all while maintaining a life. She also offers rare insight on the law school experience for women, minorities, non-traditional, and non-Ivy League students.

In the words of author Ellen Schoeck: I Was There is for anyone who loves the University of Alberta. It is a simple book of stories from alumni. They will tell you why they decided to come to university, what everyday was like for them, and where their degrees took them after graduation. You will also hear stories told by a handful of professors who were at the U of A in the early days. These first professors were pioneers in education who came from revered and established universities to take a chance on a university that only had a name - the University of Alberta. They came west to a university that had no students, staff or buildings. All that existed was a piece of paper, an act of the Legislature, passed on May 9, 1906, called the University Act. But it was people - students, faculty and staff - who brought that piece of legislation to life. This is a documentary account of their stories - stories that pluck the University's history down from the bookshelf, and make it live all over again. 1908 and you'll be with her as she fails English, her major, twice, under the scrutiny of the inspiring but unrelenting taskmaster, Dr. Broadus. Then, in 1927, you will be tossed off the roof of Athabasca Hall with Hugh Morrison (BA '30) during freshman initiation. Three decades later, long-time U of A Registrar Brian Silzer (BSc '69, Dip(Ed) '71, MEd '78) will describe what happened after he and his buddies dropped a bowling ball from the roof of their undergraduate residence, St. Stephen's College. Along the way you will meet teachers, actors, a famous pilot, physicists, researchers, military personnel, journalists, politicians, linguists, diplomats, public servants, a spy, engineers, and playwrights. You'll even meet a ghost or two.

Autonomy in governance and management in education has become the prerogative of higher education institutions, whilst optimum allocation and use of resources have become the aim of all higher education institutions. This book volume explores the creation of knowledge and its dissemination in an appropriate manner so as to create a significant impact in society. The chapter authors talk about the highly competitive education market and the transformation it has undergone. Authors from across the globe have suggested interventions that will help in sustainable growth of universities while maintaining and enhancing their quality standards. The chapters present a better understanding of a philosophy of management, society, development and education.

In "The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education, " historian D. G. Hart examines the rise of religion to its current place as one of the largest academic disciplines in contemporary higher education. Protestant ministers and faculty, arguing for the importance of religion to a truly "liberal" education, were especially influential in staffing departments and designing curricula to reflect their own assumptions about the value of religion not just for higher education but for American culture in general.

But the success of mainstream Protestantism in fostering the academic study of religion has become the field's greatest burden. Religion scholars have distanced themselves from traditional Protestant orientations while looking for topics better suited to America's cultural diversity. As a result, religion is in the awkward position of being one of the largest scholarly disciplines while simultaneously lacking a solid academic justification. It may be time, Hart argues, for academics to stop trying to secure a religion-friendly university.

Around the world, what it is to be a university is a matter of much debate. The range of ideas of the university in public circulation is, however, exceedingly narrow and is dominated by the idea of the entrepreneurial university. As a consequence, the debate is hopelessly impoverished. Lurking in the literature, there is a broad and even imaginative array of ideas of the university, but those ideas are seldom heard. We need, consequently, not just more ideas of the university but "better" ideas. "

Imagining the University" forensically examines this situation, critically interrogating many of the current ideas of the university. "Imagining the University" argues for imaginative ideas that are critical, sensitive to the deep structures underlying universities and are yet optimistic, in short "feasible utopias" of the university. The case is pressed for one such idea, that of the ecological university. The book concludes by offering a vision of the imagining university, a university that has the capacity continually to re-imagine itself.

This volume discusses the concept of The Spatial University as part of the broad growth of spatial science and the need for spatial infrastructure in colleges and universities. The book centers on the development of U-Spatial, the spatial science infrastructure at the University of Minnesota that offers a range of spatial activities and services, including data access, training, and community building. Against a backdrop of the changing nature of research, teaching, and service in higher education, the story of U-Spatial anchors a broader discussion of what it means to be a spatial university. This narrative framing demonstrates-with specific examples-the importance of institutions offering dedicated spatial research infrastructure. In six chapters, the text explores the importance of spatial thinking, learning, and research for student and researcher success. The volume offers lessons that are applicable far beyond the University of Minnesota to apply to a broad array of domains and institutional specializations. The book will be useful to students, researchers, and policymakers concerned with how institutions can encourage spatial research, teaching, and service. It will also appeal to researchers and practitioners interested in broader uses of spatial science. This book shows how GIS can transform a university, speaking to the need for leadership in higher education around the power of bringing everything together using spatial and geographic concepts. Jack Dangermond Co-Founder and President, Esri

Examines institutional transformation in the University of Dar es Salaam. The Partnership for Higher Education in Africa commissioned case studies of higher education provision in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, as part of its effort to stimulate enlightened, equitable, and knowledge-based national development, and to provide guides to understanding. The University of Dar es Salaam has put in place measures to stop the process of decay and better fulfil its core functions - the unity and commitment within its leadership attracting both government and donors. This text explores the attributes needed to harvest the fruits of the reform. In association with Partnership for Higher Education in Africa; Tanzania: Mkuki na Nyota

Intended to 'relate my experiences to the background of my period and to portray incidents in the life of a woman born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century', Edith Morley's 1944 memoir, Before and After, was written a few years after retiring as the first female professor at an English university. Born into a middle-class Victorian family, she hated being a girl, but a forward-thinking home life and a good education enabled her to overcome prejudices and become Professor of English Language at University College, Reading, in 1908. An early feminist with a strong social conscience, she 'fought...with courage...and passionate sincerity for human rights and freedom.' Covering the vividly described setting of her late Victorian childhood, her student days with the increasing freedoms they brought, the early feminist movement, the growing pains of a new university and, much later, the traumas endured by refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, this absorbing memoir brings alive a very different era, one foundational to the freedoms we enjoy today.

Higher Education is changing - in scope, style, technology, and objectives. This book looks at the impact of information technologies on higher education and the reorganization of universities in more managerial and business directions. The book combines empirical and analytical chapters from scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.

Grant funding has become increasingly crucial to universities and university faculty, even as government and private funding reductions and increased application pools result in a more and more competitive environment. Securing the funding which is available is not a simple process, and institutional support for faculty who seek grants is uneven, where it exists at all. Faculty members are often left to navigate their own ways through the shifting landscape of the grants maze. When added on top of teaching and service loads, it's no surprise that many faculty members either avoid seeking grants altogether or produce grant proposals which have little or no chance of being funded.Faculty need a guide, and this book is that guide.Written by a team of successful grant writers, "Grant Seeking in Higher Education" orients faculty to the grants culture and walks readers step-by-step through the entire grant-seeking process, from identifying sources to preparing a successful application to administering the funds after the grant is awarded. The grant-seeking toolkit--which is free online to purchasers of the book for you to download or print and use in your work--includes standard forms, templates, and timelines for proposal development so any faculty member, from the scientist to the humanities scholar, can be sure not to miss out on the funding they deserve.

In this entertaining and lively anthology, Jan Morris traces the history of the University from its foundation in the Middle Ages through to the twentieth century, combining extracts from contemporary observers with her own informative commentary.

Volume VII of The History of the University of Oxford completes the survey of nineteenth-century Oxford begun in Volume VI. After 1871 both teachers and students at Oxford were freed from tests of religious belief. The volume describes the changed mental climate in which some dons sought a new basis for morality, while many undergraduates found a compelling ideal in the ethic of public service both at home and in the empire. The contributors address a wide variety of issues, including women's education, architecture, sport, and scholarship.

The law is heavily implicated in creating, maintaining, and reproducing racialised hierarchies which bring about and preserve acute global disparities and injustices. This essential book provides an examination of the meanings of decolonisation and explores how this examination can inform teaching, researching, and practising of law.

It explores the ways in which the foundations of law are entangled in colonial thought and in its [re]production of ideas of commodification of bodies and space-time. Thus, it is an exploration of the ways in which we can use theories and praxes of decolonisation to produce legal knowledge for flourishing futures.

Volume XIV of History of Universities contains the customary mix of learned articles, book reviews, conference reports, and bibliographical information, which makes this annual publication such an indispensable book for the historian of higher education.

The second in a series, this volume traces the history of the federal University of Wales from its foundation in 1893 to the eve of World War II and places it in the broad background of higher education in Britain. The main strands of academic advance are considered along with the architecture of the principal buildings of the University. There are chapters on student life and the impact of the Great War. Since the University and its colleges were largely the product of a national movement the last two chapters of the book are devoted to the relationship between university and nation and to the nature of Welsh society during a period of cultural awakening which, argues the author, owed much to the University of Wales.

This reissue (1996) provides an in-depth analysis of the development of the Chinese university during the twentieth century - a period of momentous social, economic, cultural and political change. It brings together reflections on the Chinese university and its role in the two great experiments of modern China: Nationalist efforts to create a modern state as part of capitalist modernisation, and the Communist project of socialist construction under Soviet tutelage. In addition to these two frames of discourse, other models and patterns are examined: for instance, the persistence of cultural patterns, or Maoist revolutionary thought.

The drastically changed climate in which research universities and other institutions of higher education now function has led to grave doubts about how these institutions will operate in the future. In "The Research University In A Time Of Discontent", distinguished scholars address this concern, drawing examples and making recommendations based on their own experiences as academic administrators and faculty members. (Education)

The University of Oxford saw far-reaching intellectual and institutional changes in the course of the nineteenth century. In 1800 it was still an Anglican institution in an Anglican state, one of its foremost duties being the maintenance of the principles of the Church of England. Before the end of the century, its transformation to an undenominational `free-thinking' institution was almost complete. Volume VI of the magisterial History of the University explores the major developments of the period.

Volume IV of the magisterial History of the University of Oxford covers the seventeenth century, a period when both institutionally and intellectually the University was expanding. Oxford and its University, moreover, had a major role to play in the tumultuous religious and political events of the century: the Civil War, the Commonwealth, the Restoration. In this volume, leading experts in several fields combine to present a comprehensive and authoritative analysis and overview of the rich pattern of intellectual, political, and cultural life in seventeenth-century Oxford.

Despite comprising the largest minority in rural settings, the literature to date largely subsumes African American rural students into a broader set of Black and African American students, with a primarily urban focus. This volume focuses on the higher education pathways of rural African American students and highlights their experiences in US colleges and universities. Addressing the fact that rural students have higher high school graduation rates than their urban peers but are less likely to take paths towards higher education, the authors identify research needs, areas of concerns, and strategies to encourage and sustain greater postsecondary participation among African Americans from rural settings. Contributors to the volume address the meaning of race and place, cultural capital, gender dynamics, gifted education, college choice, teacher and education leader preparation, campus programming and the role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, with specific reference to African American rural students, to pin down a clear picture of the barriers and drivers of their higher education journeys.