Jeff Selingo’s new book, College (Un)bound, came out last week. Very brief version of this post: buy it if you want a compilation of good reporting on higher education. You should expect to enjoy it as long as you bring the salt shaker for when Selingo becomes prescriptive.
Slightly longer version:
College (Un)Bound is best thought of as a supplemented compilation of Jeff Selingo’s articles on higher ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education (and a few other places). Selingo’s reporting in individual news articles is generally very good. If you want a slice of critical academic reporting, this book is for you. Selingo’s approach to colleges and universities is skeptical, bordering on vinegary. In most parts of the book, for narrowly-defined reporting, he is careful with the facts, and as a result the general impression I have of the book is that it is a sort of updated, more responsible version of Charles Sykes’ rantings about higher ed. In the book you will find discussions of the bulk of topics that have appeared in higher-education news in the past 5 years, and researchers such as Richard Arum and Anthony Carnevale make significant appearances.
Among the very good bits of the book is Selingo’s scathing treatment of unethical marketing by tuition-dependent non-profits. Selingo documents that it’s not just for-profits that are scamming students and their families. He points out (fairly) that admissions offices generally know more about individual families than the families know about individual colleges, and they certainly know the game of college admissions much better than almost all families. And he also observes that it is difficult to balance the short-term financial obligations of choosing College A over College B against the likelihood of graduation and the (private) payoff over a career. ((In the long run, Selingo argues towards the end of the book, students would do better to go into greater hock at more prestigious institutions with high graduation rates than slightly lesser hock at institutions with low graduation rates. I will let specialists in higher ed research speak up about the extent to which that reflects current research.))
A second area where Selingo makes a substantive contribution is in his discussion of college debt — that is, debt owed by colleges. Selingo correctly notes that many colleges and universities incur substantial debt, often to feed the status aspirations of upper-level administrators. I wish he had discussed the debt accumulated by athletic edifice complexes, but he is on the money (literally) when he discusses the debt attributed to wish-fulfillment construction, such as that tied to health complexes. One note: his use of Moody’s ratings is problematic, and was unnecessary, since for public institutions, at least, debt documentation should be a part of the public records. (Remember: Moody’s fictional ratings of collateral debt obligations was a significant accelerant in shadow-bank leveraging that tipped into the 2008 financial crisis. I trust Moody’s ratings judgments about as far as I can throw the Empire State Building.)
One weakness of the book is Selingo’s occasional overenthusiastic commentary about “entrepreneurial” ideas on higher education. That gullibility is not consistent: he is quite skeptical of fads in places. But for the passages where he is a scribe for various notions such as MOOCs or for individual boosters of higher ed fads such as ASU’s Michael Crow, it undermines his credibility.
A second general weakness is Selingo’s tendency to treat all sectors of higher education as identical for long stretches of the text. While he occasionally spotlights a specific sector, he quickly skips from public four-year colleges to tuition-dependent non-profits and then major research universities (generally missing community colleges). Wasn’t part of his intended audience parents of teenagers, who might benefit by a clear description of how “higher ed” is really several groups of institutions?
But the most general weakness of the book is Selingo’s inconsistency on a broad range of issues, inconsistencies that would not be apparent in individual articles but become glaring in the context of a book whose author claims it has an important argument about the future of higher education. In the course of the book, you can find the following:
- A passage decrying one pair of parents ignoring the value of community colleges… with the rest of the book mostly ignoring community colleges except for limited passages (e.g., in the last chapter, only one example of exciting stuff is from a community college).
- A cry for families to be better consumers, and also a mini-jeremiad against universities who treat students and families as consumers.
- A claim early in the book that English is subsidized by law schools and then a claim a few chapters later that English classes are cash cows that subsidize lab classes.
- A tone asserting that higher education on the whole is defensive and will refuse to move until disrupted, and yet almost every single example of a program Selingo finds admirable appears in … a college or university today.
- An argument at one point in favor of mandatory standardized consumer-report-style outcomes for every college, and a chapter at the end admiring a broad range of innovative programs … without any discussion of outcomes at these institutions or for these programs.
These problems are not fatal flaws — as I noted above, the book is valuable as a slice of reporting, and it works as an argument of sorts if Selingo’s basic point is that we are witnessing a higher education fin de siècle. I am moderately skeptical of that claim, but if you ignore Selingo’s prescriptions, the book is a more coherent read. Certainly it would be a useful book to assign an undergraduate or masters class discussing current education policy, as there are many points in the text that can be springboards for discussion. If you’re looking for a coherent policy argument, on the other hand, you may be looking for a different book.