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In this important book on American higher education, Edward Morris argues that undergraduate students at most U.S. colleges and universities are being shortchanged. Year after year, tuition and fees grow at a rate well above that of inflation, with the result that today's generation of students is paying-in real dollars-more than twice as much to go to college as their parents did. At the same time, informed observers with a stake in the outcome-parents, employers, and educators themselves-are increasingly skeptical of the quality of the degrees students are receiving. A disconnect between the cost and benefits appears to be growing unabated on the nation's campuses. In these pages Dr. Morris lays out "what ails undergraduate education," including:

  • An unfocused, "multiversity" structure under which schools try to be all things to all people-and neglect their students in the process.
  • A publish or perish policy for faculty that too often results in intellectual resources being diverted from the classroom to inconsequential academic research.
  • A tenure system that provides senior professors with career-long employment and minimal accountability-and little in the way of incentives to teach. ?
  • A tradition of faculty governance that puts the professor's needs above the student's.
  • A disregard for much needed economies of scale, with universities spending too much money on too few students in order to climb higher in annual rankings of colleges.

At the same time, Dr. Morris sets forth a remedy for many of the ills of modern academia by describing the recent successes of Lindenwood University. He details how Lindenwood, a self proclaimed "teaching university," manages to provide a high quality and affordable liberal arts education to its undergraduates by disregarding many of the ill-conceived practices of America's higher education establishment.

Publication Date

1-2007

Publisher

Lindenwood University Press

City

St. Charles, Missouri

Keywords

undergraduate education, liberal arts

Disciplines

Education

The Lindenwood Model: An Antidote for What Ails Undergraduate Education

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