Making Reform Work

Price: $25.95  

Subtitle: The Case for Transforming American Higher Education
Author: Robert Zemsky
Subject: Public Policy / American Studies
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4591-2
Pages: 240 pages
Publication Date: September 2009

Praise for Making Reform Work

"Higher education's best "critical friend," Bob Zemsky, has crafted a diagnosis and reform agenda that is comprehensive, engaging, and smart. This book should be required reading for anyone who runs a college or university, or purports to make policy in this arena. "—Peter Ewell, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems

"Vintage Zemsky: an insightful, provocative, pragmatic, and downright compelling account of what urgently needs changing in American higher education. A "must read."—William F. Massy

"Robert Zemsky distinguishes himself yet again as a premier thought leader for American higher education. He substitutes solid data and uncommon sense for the rhetoric of lament, providing the parameters of pragmatic strategies for improving on what is, after all, a remarkably successful but imperfect system."—Joel M. Smith, Vice Provost and Chief Information Officer, Carnegie Mellon University

"Zemsky's book provides a good starting point for a balanced approach to the further improvement of higher education. Among his valuable bits of advice are that institutions should strive to be ‘market-smart and mission-centred’, that reform efforts should be strategic, that reformers should avoid vilification and lamentations, and that university leaders themselves should play leading roles in such campaigns." —THE, 1/14/10

Making Reform Work is a practical narrative of ideas that begins by describing who is saying what about American higher education—who’s angry, who’s disappointed, and why. Most of the pleas for changing American colleges and universities that originate outside the academy are lamentations on a small number of too often repeated themes. The critique from within the academy focuses on issues principally involving money and the power of the market to change colleges and universities. Sandwiched between these perspectives is a public that still has faith in an enterprise that it really doesn’t understand.

Robert Zemsky, one of a select group of scholars who participated in Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’s 2005 Commission on the Future of Higher Education, signed off on the commission’s report with reluctance. In Making Reform Work he presents the ideas he believes should have come from that group to forge a practical agenda for change. Zemsky argues that improving higher education will require enlisting faculty leadership, on the one hand, and, on the other, a strategy for changing the higher education system writ large.

Directing his attention from what can’t be done to what can be done, Zemsky providesnumerous suggestions. These include a renewed effort to help students’ performance inhigh schools and a stronger focus on the science of active learning, not just teachingmethods. He concludes by suggesting a series of dislodging events—for example, making a three-year baccalaureate the standard undergraduate degree, congressional rethinking of student aid in the wake of the loan scandal, and a change in the rules governing endowments—that could break the gridlock that today holds higher education reform captive.

Making Reform Work offers three rules for successful college and university transformation: don’t vilify, don’t play games, and come to the table with a well-thought-out strategy rather than a sharply worded lamentation.

Robert Zemsky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, heads the Learning Alliance. A leading voice for American higher education reform for three decades, his major works include The Structure of College Choice, the first major study of the market for higher education; Higher Education as Competitive Enterprise, a comprehensive typology of higher education; and Remaking the American University (Rutgers University Press), a host of new, often radical ways to think about American higher education.