American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political, and Economic Challenges, 3rd edition (2011) Philip G. Altbach, Patricia J. Gumport, & Robert O. Berdahl, editors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The editors of this text, which is now in its third edition, have curated a broad overview of pressing issues in U.S. higher education.Despite considerable continuities in chapter topics, the fact that there have already been two new editions since its initial publication nearly 15 years ago attests to the pace of change in higher education in the century it purports to canvass.For example, Slaughter and Rhoades' intervention on the expanding commercialization and neoliberalization of higher education through the framework of an "academic capitalist knowledge-learning regime" (p.433) was added to the second edition, published in 2005, and remains a vital inclusion in this most recent edition.Even since 2011, there have been notable developments in the landscape of popular and scholarly concern, including the growth of online education, especially in the form of massive open online courses (MOOCs), as well as intensified trends in the adjunctification of faculty, mounting concerns about for-profit colleges, and growing student debt loads.Perhaps in part due to the pace of change, it is not uncommon today to read pieces in the mainstream press signalling a kind of crisis moment predicting the end of higher education (particularly public colleges and universities) as we know it.While many such pieces include thoughtful observation and critique, they do not always engage rigorously with the earlier precedents of many current challenges.The notion of crisis is itself equivocal.According to Rancière, "'what we call "crisis" is the extreme form of a normal operation'" (as cited in Kakogianni & Rancière, 2013, p. 19).Crises are often cyclical.It was nearly a century ago that Veblen (2005) wrote his stinging critique of rising business influence on "the intellectual enterprise for the pursuit of which the university is established" (p.50), but similar laments are frequently voiced about the current higher education landscape.Yet if crises are largely exaggerations of ongoing challenges, if not pathologies, crisis has nonetheless found wide purchase as a concept in scholarly and popular accounts of higher education alike, in part because of its flexible use.For example, state legislatures might frame a projected budget shortfall as a crisis to justify slashed funding for public colleges and universities, while those in favour of radical pedagogical alternatives might view intensified public defunding as further proof of the need to expand deinstitutionalized educational opportunities (e.g.,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".