Book review of "Rethinking Higher Education"

George Fallis, (2013), Rethinking Higher Education, Kingston: Queen's University School of Policy Studies. Pages 314. Price: CDN $39.95 (paper). ISBN978-1-55339-333-7.If Charles Dickens were to review Rethinking Higher Education he might be begin by saying it was the best of recent books on higher education, and the most demanding of those books to comprehend fully. George Fallis is smart. He takes the call for evidencebased policy seriously. When difficult problems require difficult solutions, he does not cut corners. He assumes that serious readers do not want to cut corners either. This all is to his credit and stands as a good reason to read this book. It is worth the time, the thought, and sometimes the discomfort of having to have second thoughts about conventional wisdom.Let's begin with an example of conventional wisdom's being turned upside down. Access is old-think. Attainability is new-think. Rethinking Higher Education is not the first time that Professor Fallis has persuasively argued that Ontario's goals for participation in higher education have already been met, and that further growth in the rate of participation is neither realistic nor necessary. In other words, Ontario has already achieved universal participation. In fact, according to Professor Fallis' analysis, actual university and college capacities exceed demand for them. He makes this argument by carefully and objectively re-analyzing data that have been readily available for some time, and by acknowledging certain inconvenient facts. For example, the high school graduation rate will never reach 100 per cent; some potential students will for good reason forego participation in higher From this frank and thorough appraisal he concludes that the rethink priority for the future should be attainment. Colleges and universities should redirect their priorities to the improvement of rates of retention and graduation.It is true that Rethinking Higher Education is mainly about Ontario. A reader with knowledge of that province will get more from the book than a reader with less familiarity. Nevertheless, all readers can learn a lot from the approach that Professor Fallis takes to analyzing evidence. The shiftthat Professor Fallis proposes from access to attainment, again as an example, is illustrative the analytical value of the book. A chemist might call the approach a metabolic pathway. In the case of the demand for access in Ontario, Professor Fallis goes beyond the usual boundaries of higher education research by following a series of inter-related steps, each step affecting the next one, and so on. Thus the reader is invited to think about the entire age-group that precedes post-secondary entry, and the entire labour market for that population. This is an analytical lesson worth learning.Professor Fallis reminds readers that there is something called education. He wrote more extensively about this in his previous book, Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy (2007). His critique is not the usual nostalgia for some past golden age as personified by Mark Hopkins and a student sitting at either end of the same log. Instead he invites us the rediscover the modern value of liberal In more particular terms what he has mainly in mind is the branch of the liberal arts that in other times was called general education. Of particular importance is his identification of the liberal arts as separate in curricular terms from individual disciplines, as Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins might have done. He is advocating curricular and non-departmental structure as a universal foundation for all programs. In this context structure is liberating instead of confining. It invites a different notion of what a department is, and what a program is. Professor Fallis observes, without approbation, that the organization of undergraduate instruction around departments is an isomorphic impediment. However he stops short in two important respects. …

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