"Improving Learning Environments" provides the first systematic comparative cross-national study of school disciplinary climates. In this volume, leading international social science researchers explore nine national case studies to identify the institutional determinants of variation in school discipline, the possible links between school environments and student achievement, as well as the implications of these findings for understanding social inequality.
As the book demonstrates, a better understanding of school discipline is essential to the formation of effective educational policies. Ultimately, to improve a school's ability to contribute to youth socialization and student internalization of positive social norms and values, any changes in school discipline must not only be responsive to behavior problems but should also work to enhance the legitimacy and moral authority of school actors.

The mass expansion of higher education is one of the most important social transformations of the second half of the twentieth century. In this book, scholars from 15 countries, representing Western and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Israel, Australia, and the United States, assess the links between this expansion and inequality in the national context.
Contrary to most expectations, the authors show that as access to higher education expands, all social classes benefit. Neither greater diversification nor privatization in higher education results in greater inequality. In some cases, especially where the most advantaged already have significant access to higher education, opportunities increase most for persons from disadvantaged origins. Also, during the late twentieth century, opportunities for women increased faster than those for men. Offering a new spin on conventional wisdom, this book shows how all social classes benefit from the expansion of higher education.

The mass expansion of higher education is one of the most important social transformations of the second half of the twentieth century. In this book, scholars from 15 countries, representing Western and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Israel, Australia, and the United States, assess the links between this expansion and inequality in the national context. Contrary to most expectations, the authors show that as access to higher education expands, all social classes benefit. Neither greater diversification nor privatization in higher education results in greater inequality. In some cases, especially where the most advantaged already have significant access to higher education, opportunities increase most for persons from disadvantaged origins. Also, during the late twentieth century, opportunities for women increased faster than those for men. Offering a new spin on conventional wisdom, this book shows how all social classes benefit from the expansion of higher education.

In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor's degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they're born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by "Academically Adrift" are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?
For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills--including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing--during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise--instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list.
"
Academically Adrift" holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents--all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa's report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.

Few books have ever made their presence felt on college campuses--and newspaper opinion pages--as quickly and thoroughly as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's 2011 landmark study of undergraduates' learning, socialization, and study habits, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses." From the moment it was published, one thing was clear: no university could afford to ignore its well-documented and disturbing findings about the failings of undergraduate education. Now Arum and Roksa are back, and their new book follows the same cohort of undergraduates through the rest of their college careers and out into the working world. Built on interviews and detailed surveys of almost a thousand recent college graduates from a diverse range of colleges and universities, "Aspiring Adults Adrift" reveals a generation facing a difficult transition to adulthood. Recent graduates report trouble finding decent jobs and developing stable romantic relationships, as well as assuming civic and financial responsibility--yet at the same time, they remain surprisingly hopeful and upbeat about their prospects. Analyzing these findings in light of students' performance on standardized tests of general collegiate skills, selectivity of institutions attended, and choice of major, Arum and Roksa not only map out the current state of a generation too often adrift, but enable us to examine the relationship between college experiences and tentative transitions to adulthood. Sure to be widely discussed, "Aspiring Adults Adrift" will compel us once again to re-examine the aims, approaches, and achievements of higher education.

This book presents results of a cross-national research project on self-employment in eleven advanced economies and demonstrates how and why the practice is reemerging in modern societies. While traditional forms of self-employment, such as skilled crafts work and shop keeping, are in decline, they are being replaced by self-employment in both professional and unskilled occupations. Differences in self-employment across societies depend on the extent to which labor markets are regulated and the degree to which intergenerational family relationships are a primary factor structuring social organization.

For each of the eleven countries analyzed, the book highlights the extent to which social background, educational attainment, work history, family status, and gender affect the likelihood that an individual will enter--and continue--a particular type of self-employment. While involvement with self-employment is becoming more common, it is occurring for individuals in activities that are more diverse, unstable and transitory than in years past.

In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor's degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they're born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by "Academically Adrift" are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?
For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills--including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing--during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise--instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list.
"
Academically Adrift" holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents--all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa's report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.

Reprimand a class comic, restrain a bully, dismiss a student for brazen attire--and you may be facing a lawsuit, costly regardless of the result. This reality for today's teachers and administrators has made the issue of school discipline more difficult than ever before--and public education thus more precarious. This is the troubling message delivered in "Judging School Discipline," a powerfully reasoned account of how decades of mostly well-intended litigation have eroded the moral authority of teachers and principals and degraded the quality of American education.

"Judging School Discipline" casts a backward glance at the roots of this dilemma to show how a laudable concern for civil liberties forty years ago has resulted in oppressive abnegation of adult responsibility now. In a rigorous analysis enriched by vivid descriptions of individual cases, the book explores 1,200 cases in which a school's right to control students was contested.

Richard Arum and his colleagues also examine several decades of data on schools to show striking and widespread relationships among court leanings, disciplinary practices, and student outcomes; they argue that the threat of lawsuits restrains teachers and administrators from taking control of disorderly and even dangerous situations in ways the public would support.