Description: "The book everyone with a college-age kid should read." --Katie Couric * "Anyone who wants to understand the crisis in higher education--and help solve it--should read this book." --Greg Lukianoff, author of The Coddling of the American Mind *
"Everyone has an opinion about higher education, but ironically few scholars actually study it in a systematic way. What Happened to College? brings data and rigorous thinking to bear on the question of how a university system that is in many ways the envy of the world has lost the confidence of such a large share of the country." --Matthew Yglesias A sociologist who has been tracking the polarization of higher ed reveals how things went off track, what students are saying, and where we can find hope. The campus culture wars are raging, but what's really going on behind the headlines? A decade after his landmark book on faculty politics, Neil Gross launched a massive investigation into student life on campus, interviewing over a hundred faculty, students, and administrators across the country and polling thousands more. He looked at liberal arts colleges, state schools, faith-based institutions, and elite universities and combed through studies tracking everything from dating habits and dwindling enrolment in the humanities to the liberal bias embedded in course syllabi. What he found was startling: Undergraduates today are choosing their schools, their friends, their partners, their activities--even their majors--on the basis of their political beliefs to a degree unimaginable ten years ago, with the goal of interacting as little as possible with anyone whose views don't line up with their own. Popular campus dating apps invite you to swipe left if you don't like someone's political profile--a metaphor for today's college experience writ large. Instead of resisting this trend, faculty and administrators often encouraged it, creating a cloistered environment where students could avoid uncomfortable disagreement. It isn't so much that the faculty are indoctrinating students--no one likes to be told what to think. Students, if anything, are indoctrinating themselves. What Happened to College? paints a picture of an educational system in crisis and ripe for change. Grounding his analysis in sorely needed data, deftly debunking overstated claims, Gross offers vivid, fly-on-the-wall insights into what it's like to be a student today at one of our nation's top colleges. While some students will cheat their way to easy As, he he found places where open debate, intellectual inquiry and friendship across political lines still thrive. What are these campus communities doing right and how can prospective students find them? Can we teach students to disagree better? At a time of growing political stridency, nothing could be more important or more necessary.Brief description: A sociologist known for his data-driven explorations of campus politics and American life, Neil Gross is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Colby College. He is the author of Why are Professors Liberal and Why do Conservatives Care? which was based on the most comprehensive study of faculty politics since the 1960s. He has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Williams, and the University of Southern California and written for The Atlantic and The New York Times.
Review Quotes: "Everyone has an opinion about higher education, but ironically few scholars actually study it in a systematic way. Neil Gross's What Happened to College? brings data and rigorous thinking to bear on the question of how a university system that is in many ways the envy of the world has lost the confidence of such a large share of the country. Anyone who cares about the future of our most important and influential institutions should read this book to understand what's actually happening."
--Matthew Yglesias, cofounder of Vox and author of the Substack Slow Boring