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It is no surprise that college tuition and student debt are on the
rise. Universities no longer charge tuition to simply cover costs.
They are market enterprises that charge whatever the market will
bear. Institutional ambition, along with increasing competition for
students, now shapes the economics of higher education. In The
Market Imperative, Robert Zemsky and Susan Shaman argue that too
many institutional leaders and policymakers do not understand how
deeply the consumer markets they promoted have changed American
higher education. Instead of functioning as a single integrated
industry, higher education is in fact a collection of segmented and
more or less separate markets. These markets have their own
distinctive operating constraints and logics, especially regarding
price. But those most responsible for federal higher education
policy have made a muck of the enterprise, while state policymaking
has all but disappeared, the victim of weak imaginations,
insufficient funding, and an aversion to targeted investment.
Chapter by chapter, The Market Imperative draws on new data
developed by the authors in a Gates Foundation-funded project to
describe the landscape: how the market for higher education
distributes students among competing institutions; what the job
market is looking for; how markets differ across the fifty states;
and how the higher education market determines the kinds of faculty
at different kinds of institutions. The volume concludes with a
three-pronged set of policies for making American higher education
mission centered as well as market smart. Although there is no
"one-size-fits-all" approach for reforming higher education, this
clearly written book will productively advance understanding of the
challenges colleges and universities face by providing a mapping of
the configuration of the market for an undergraduate education.
Provides an insightful analysis of the market stresses that
threaten the viability of some of America's colleges and
universities while delivering a powerful predictive tool to measure
an institution's risk of closure. In The College Stress Test,
Robert Zemsky, Susan Shaman, and Susan Campbell Baldridge present
readers with a full, frank, and informed discussion about college
and university closures. Drawing on the massive institutional data
set available from IPEDS (the Integrated Postsecondary Education
Data System), they build a stress test for estimating the market
viability of more than 2,800 undergraduate institutions. They
examine four key variables-new student enrollments, net cash price,
student retention, and major external funding-to gauge whether an
institution is potentially at risk of considering closure or
merging with another school. They also assess student body
demographics to see which students are commonly served by
institutions experiencing market stress. The book's appendix
includes a powerful do-it-yourself tool that institutions can
apply, using their own IPEDS data, to understand their level of
risk. The book's underlying statistical analysis makes clear that
closings will not be nearly as prevalent as many prognosticators
are predicting and will in fact impact relatively few students. The
authors argue that just 10 percent or fewer of the nation's
colleges and universities face substantial market risk, while 60
percent face little or no market risk. The remaining 30 percent of
institutions, the authors find, are bound to struggle. To thrive,
the book advises, these schools will need to reconsider the
curricula they deliver, the prices they charge, and their
willingness to experiment with new modes of instruction. The
College Stress Test provides an urgently needed road map at a
moment when the higher education terrain is shifting. Those
interested in and responsible for the fate of these institutions
will find in this book a clearly defined set of risk indicators, a
methodology for monitoring progress over time, and an
evidence-based understanding of where they reside in the landscape
of institutional risk.
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