Library Resources for BBC Faculty (Hubert Library)

Two of the most visible and important trends in higher education today are its exploding costs and the rapid expansion of online learning. Could the growth in online courses slow the rising cost of college and help solve the crisis of affordability? In this short and incisive book, William G. Bowen, one of the foremost experts on the intersection of education and economics, explains why, despite his earlier skepticism, he now believes technology has the potential to help rein in costs without negatively affecting student learning.

Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for one hundred years, while faculties and student bodies have radically changed and technology has drastically transformed the way people produce and disseminate knowledge.

The Innovative University illustrates how higher education can respond to the forces of disruptive innovation , and offers a nuanced and hopeful analysis of where the traditional university and its traditions have come from and how it needs to change for the future. Through an examination of Harvard and BYU-Idaho as well as other stories of innovation in higher education, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring decipher how universities can find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions.

Synthesizes the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) findings to help teachers choose teaching techniques and tools. It will also help faculty determine how to approach SoTL research on particular pedagogical issues on the basis of what is already known from the literature by clearly identifying the gaps in the SoTL literature.

Calling for a thorough overhaul of a self-indulgent system, the authors make an incisive case that the American way of higher education, now a $420 billion-per-year business, has lost sight of its primary mission: the education of young adults.

At a time when higher education attendance has never felt more mandatory for career success and economic growth, the contributors ask readers to consider the civic mission of higher education as equally vital to the nation's well-being. Should higher education serve a greater public interest? In what ways should colleges and universities be asked to participate in public controversies?

Contentious debates over the benefits or drawbacksof a liberal education are as old as America itself. From Benjamin Franklin to the Internet pundits, critics of higher education have attacked its irrelevance and elitism often calling for more vocational instruction. In this provocative contribution to the disputes, university president Michael S. Roth focuses on important moments and seminal thinkers in America's long-running argument over vocational vs. liberal education.

Much of what is written about colleges and universities ties rapidly rising tuition to dysfunctional behavior in the academy. Common targets of dysfunction include prestige games among universities, gold plated amenities, and bloated administration. This book offers a different view. Toexplain rising college cost, the authors place the higher education industry firmly within the larger economic history of the United States.