Buying the Best

Cost Escalation in Elite Higher Education

Charles T. Clotfelter (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

334 Seiten

2014
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-0-691-60136-6 (ISBN)

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Since the early 1980s, the rapidly increasing cost of college, together with what many see as inadequate attention to teaching, has elicited a barrage of protest. Buying the Best looks at the realities behind these criticisms--at the economic factors that are in fact driving the institutions that have been described as machines without brakes. In designing his study, Charles Clotfelter examines the escalation in spending in the arts and sciences at four elite institutions: Harvard, Duke, Chicago, and Carleton. He argues that the rise in costs has less to do with increasing faculty salaries or lowered productivity than with a broad-based effort to improve quality, provide new services to students, pay for large investments in new facilities and equipment (including computers), and ensure access for low-income students through increasingly expensive financial aid. In Clotfelter's view, spiraling costs arise from the institutions' lofty ambitions and are made possible by steadily intensifying demand for places in the country's elite colleges and universities. Only if this demand slackens will universities be pressured to make cuts or pursue efficiencies.
Buying the Best is the first study to make use of the internal historical records of specific institutions, as opposed to the frequently unreliable aggregate records made available by the federal government for the use of survey researchers. As such, it has the virtue of allowing Clotfelter to draw much more realistic comparative conclusions than have hitherto been reported. While acknowledging the obvious drawbacks of a small sample, Clotfelter notes that the institutions studied are significant for the disproportionate influence they, and comparable elite institutions, exercise upon research and upon the training of future leaders. The book contains a foreword by William G. Bowen, President of the Mellon Foundation, and Harold T. Shapiro, President of Princeton University. "Concern about ever-rising costs runs like a thread through the myriad critiques of higher education that have been published in recent years...One of the great contributions of Clotfelter's work is to dismiss easy explanations for the problems that worry us.
With some of the scales removed from their eyes, both those with responsibility for the future of higher education and observers who continue to expect an ever-wider scope of effort from particular colleges and universities, can now adjust their focus. Armed with this original and extremely useful analysis, we can confront more directly (and with less romanticism) the real choices before us as we seek to employ limited resources most effectively in the service of teaching and research."-William G. Bowen, President, Mellon Foundation, Harold T. Shapiro, President, Princeton University, from the foreword Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

List of FiguresList of TablesForewordPrefaceList of AbbreviationsCh. 1The Problem of Rising Costs1Ch. 2A Peculiar Institution20Appendix 2.1 A Simple Financial Model of a University51Appendix 2.2 Decomposing Rates of Growth in Expenditures57Ch. 3Boom Times for Selective Institutions58Appendix 3.1 Supplementary Tables for Chapter 377Ch. 4Patterns and Trends in Expenditures82Appendix 4.1 Dealing with Interdepartmental Transfers and Recharges117Appendix 4.2 Categories Used to Create Expenditure Tables121Appendix 4.3 Trends in Duke Expenditures from 1976/77 to 1983/84135Ch. 5The Sources of Rising Expenditures139Appendix 5.1 Supplementary Tables for Chapter 5159Ch. 6Administrative Functions162Ch. 7The Allocation of Faculty Effort179Appendix 7.1 Options for Providing Classroom Instruction205Appendix 7.2 Calculation of Classroom Teaching Loads and Course Characteristics206Appendix 7.3 Data on Committee Membership216Ch. 8Classes and Course Offerings218Appendix 8.1 Supplementary Tables for Chapter 8240Ch. 9Ambition Meets Opportunity247Notes to the Chapters265Bibliography285Index293

Erscheint lt. Verlag	14.7.2014
Reihe/Serie	National Bureau of Economic Research Publications
Zusatzinfo	28 line drawings, 66 tables
Verlagsort	New Jersey
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik ► Erwachsenenbildung
ISBN-10	0-691-60136-4 / 0691601364
ISBN-13	978-0-691-60136-6 / 9780691601366
Zustand	Neuware