Book review of "Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In some respects -in fact, most --Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed says little of relevance to higher education in Canada.But in those few respects that do have a bearing on the Canadian experience, the book can be a thought-provoking read.First, it is important to understand that the book's title is an over-statement.It is not about higher education at large.It is about higher education in the United States and, more particularly, about a single sector: religious colleges.Religious colleges constitute a large sector of higher education in the United Status, even larger when measured in terms of undergraduate education.By that definition there are only few Canadian counterparts for example, Redeemer, Tyndale, and Trinity-Western, all sectarian institutions offering secular degrees.Professor Brown's explanation of this focus is that a broader focus would have been methodologically unmanageable.There is practical truth to that: the book's research relies entirely on 150 confidential in-person interviews at eight colleges, each identified by a pseudonym.These are in turn organized into four "strategies" that were adopted from previous studies of for-profit colleges, an interesting methodological choice that deserves explanation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".