education-industry

This book is an examination of the efforts of the corporate class to reconstruct the university system. Although written in a Marxist perspective, this book doesn't merely theorize, but presents a detailed fact-based account of the actual decisions and strategies implemented to centralize the university system and to coordinate it to the interests of business. This book is essential for anyone who seeks to understand how the American state ideology is perpetuated through the education system.

"What Business Wants from Higher Education" lays out a blueprint for transforming higher education into a farm system for corporate America. At no point do Oblinger and Verville entertain the idea that a university and a corporation might have different (and perhaps incompatible) functions and values, or that one social contribution of a university might even be to provide an alternative to the corporate world. A university is simply a training ground for future corporate employees. It is a business like any other, with a product (degrees), customers (students), and "stakeholders" (that's right: "stakeholders," sort of like "stockholders"). And like a business, it must be competitive and strive for greater "productivity." How is productivity measured in a university? By extruding degrees more quickly, easily, and cheaply. And how is this to be accomplished? By heavy reliance on IT (instructional technology) and distance learning (spell: more sales of PC's, a not undesirable prospect for these two IBM employees). In addition to pitching electronic correspondence courses, "What Business Wants from Higher Education" endorses other educational panaceas du jour: students need less "seat time" (students don't need to go to class so darned often); students should be able to get academic credit for non-academic activities (internships and "life experience"); students need to become "active, lifetime learners" (an obvious truism the authors invoke to diminish the importance of school learning); and--oh yes--institutions must adopt "outcomes assessment" to ensure accountability. What is outcomes assessment? A euphemism for simplifying and dumbing down course objectives so that the "efficiency" of university classes can supposedly be measured. Oblinger and Verville are to be commended for their honesty, though. They make it clear that one principal attraction of outcomes assessment is that it will allow students to challenge and test out of courses more easily (we can already see campus entrepreneurs gearing up to crank out the inevitable study guides). Of course students will get their credits simply by displaying a minimal level of competency, but that is fine with the authors. Our lifetime learners are after easy credits and a quick certification, a realization that has made the founder of the University of Phoenix rich. Why all these changes? The stodgy university is falling behind the corporate world, where no paradigm lasts for more than six months (except perhaps for ideas like sending jobs offshore, employing as few people as possible, paying them the minimum, withholding job security and retirement benefits, and overcompensating corporate chieftains). Like corporations, the modern university needs to be in a constant mode of change, adopting innovations in the blink of an eye. The best way to prepare students for corporate life (presumably the only economically defensible function of a university) is to give them an early dose of impermanence, transient loyalty, and mercenary values. But knowing which band wagons to mount will require leaders with vision, leaders with flexibility, leaders with autocratic power. Our universities stand poised to leap into the future, if only their chancellors and presidents can be given dictatorial power to inflict the kind of relatively untested changes proposed by Oblinger and Verville. But they have an obstacle--those stodgy, ossified people called the faculty, the teachers and researchers who do the fundamental and defining work of the university. And trying to move them, as someone has said, is like trying to herd cats. And why can't faculty be compelled to move obediently and with sufficient dispatch? They have tenure, the power that enables them to exercise their best professional judgment. So what happens when an upper-echelon educrat proposes wide scale use of electronic correspondence courses? These mossbacks want to discuss the proposal, debate its merits, field test it, analyze its successes and failures. Only then will they consider adoption. Faculty want to look before they leap, look before they agree to turn universities into the kind of educational vending machines proposed by the authors. In sum, what does the book propose, besides a university devoted to Mammon, to the production of serfs for corporate America? In the name of competitiveness and productivity, it proposes to turn the modern American university into an Eden for educrats, a lovely field of dreams for ambitious higher education administrators. Like the person who wrote the forward (Molly Corbett Broad) and the last person quoted in this manifesto (Barry Munitz), they want to make glamorous career moves--Broad left the California State University system to become the president of the University of North Carolina system, and Munitz jumped from the chancellorship of the CSU to the Getty foundation. To make such leaps, one must have gaudy entries in one's resume, like dramatic innovations in educational structure and delivery, but under the current dispensation--where faculty still make most of the decisions governing curriculum and pedagogy--such entries are difficult to come by. But no longer if Oblinger and Verville get their way. They envision a university where the president is a CEO with autocratic power, and faculty are as weak and discardable as corporate employees. Tenure will be a thing of the past, and full professors will be an endangered species. The role of faculty will be to obey their administrative masters. A field of dreams for administrators, indeed, and all we have to do is turn our universities into diploma mills. It is not by accident that most of the changes proposed by Oblinger and Verville are already familiar fixtures of enterprises like Nova University, National University, and the University of Phoenix. For students of the corporatization of America and the bureaucratization of the university, a must read.

I did enjoy every page of this book, although I haven't read all of them. It's more an encyclopedia, which you may use in your day-to-day business, than something you will read straight through over the weekend. Very valuable and up-to-date were the chapters about intercultural and e-mail communication. Strong recommendation.

This is a fantastic book. It can be used for reference at home and at work. It helped me fine tune my job resume and also helps in communications between companies at work. Keep this book, you never know when you need a letter format or an outline for some other form of written communication.

This book is really good to help me understand my course. It was well developed and accounted for basic skills needed for people to develop their skills. It was full of useful, colourful illustrations and easy to comprehend. The exercises were excellent and it did make me really able to detect my mistakes. The book would be helpful for future references (example: attending interviews, writing letters). I wouldn't even trade this book with another since I found it will help me to improve my skills in communicating and writing.

The author finds that the direct involvement of corporations with the primary and secondary schools of America hardly enhances the education of students. The rhetoric of "win-win" and of "choice" in school-business partnerships and in privatized schools is empty, misleading sloganeering.

Every school-business partnership described in the book shows that the primary interest is in promoting products and corporate images whether in the form of product giveaways, the plastering of corporate logos on school property, or the penetration of the school day by private television networks advertising products appealing to students. In some cases, there is clear intent in creating interest on the part of students in entry-level clerical or service jobs such as those found in grocery stores or in the fast-food business. One grocery chain hires teachers for summer work expressly to persuade them to help in recruitment efforts among student populations.

The motive for privatization, or corporate-managed or -owned schools, is purely one of profit. Privatization is promoted as enhancing "choice." But providing choices for, say, special students or those interested in extra-curricular activities is costly. Privatized schools invariably reduce curriculum choices and require teachers to closely follow course blueprints with the primary goal being one of inculcating facts useful for scoring high on standardized tests. High test-scores bolster the product, that is, the school, that the corporation is selling. Broader and more nebulous educational goals are shoved aside because they are viewed as a drain on the bottom line. An additional consequence of private school choice is the inevitable segmentation of student bodies along racial and class lines as the ability to pay excludes some from having actual "choice."

In addition to specific corporate involvement in schools, the author is concerned with the predominance of business thinking in the broader culture and its impact on our school systems. It has become a standard view among political and business elites that the essential purpose of schools is to train future employees. According to them, the primary focus of schools should be on teaching "skills" to students that are directly useful in work places. In this line of thinking schools are not the locus for wide-ranging intellectual endeavor. Teachers as intellectuals are not needed. Instead, they are seen as essentially education clerks, as employees, that follow management's direction in producing a product. Students are said to get an education, a product, closing the circle on the commodification of education. In another vein of corporate determination, the textbook industry sanitizes book content to ensure greater book sales which is contrary to the spirit of open inquiry.

In the face such reductionistic and regimented thinking, the author pushes throughout the book for the spread of "critical transitivity" in our schools whereby a critical and flexible approach by both teachers and students is taken in acquiring broad knowledge. He is concerned with what finds as the oligopolistic nature of the United States. He sees schools as being centers for the education of democratic practice and where critiques of our culture, capitalism, and social injustice are mounted.

While the author seems to be on solid ground to decry the move to quantify schools by simplified, standardized testing and the de-professionalization of teaching, it is worrisome to see what amounts to a social agenda being proposed as a replacement. Children and teenagers are not equipped to engage in social critique; they simply do not have enough worldly experience to have informed, independent opinions. One would hope that the author is not suggesting that the influencing of young minds with the social agenda of teachers has more merit than business-imposed thinking. It is for adult citizens to make democracy a reality in the political process, in workplaces, and in the broader culture including schools. Meanwhile, there is much for students to learn beyond workplace "skills" long before they become agents for social change.

The book seems to be grabbing for too much. It details actual corporate involvement in schools; it is concerned with the dominance of business thought; and it wants schools themselves to be the agents to change all of that. And those topics get intermixed. Also, at times the book can get a little overloaded with academic jargon as the author sprinkles in talk about techno-rationality, non-propositional versus propositional knowledge, consumer materialism, and intransitivity versus critical transitivity, etc. But for the most part the author's points are on the money. Our school systems have gotten derailed by some very dubious thinking. This book contributes to understanding the situation.

A school teacher, I never even thought that our school-business partnerships could be anything but "good." We were told they were "win-win" situations, and we seemed to benefit. Boyles' book, however, points out many shortcomings that aren't so obvious. It's in the third chapter when he provides example after example of business partnerships and then proceeds to reveal the errors and the major issues that teachers and students should know...but just don't really pay attention (in my case, anyway). I got a paperback version of the book for $22, and it was worth every penny. I'm going into my classes this fall armed with information about grocery store gimmicks and corporate "donations" that I intend to pose to my students...which is the author's real point. It's a great read...a little academic at times, but humorous and compelling.

My husband and I own a small business and I am always trying to find out how the big,successful guys do it. This book has given us inspiration and practical ideas how to improve our approach to improving our bottom line. The chapter entitled "Don't Be Afraid to Be an Agent of Change" would be helpful to families and even to politicians. People who run failing school systems could definitely learn something from reading this book; maybe they would not be so afraid of school vouchers!

Erika Brown profiles 16 computer and Internet industry leaders in this informative and entertaining book. A senior reporter for Forbes, Brown brings a journalist's insight to each profile and seeks to extract the ideas and strategies that made each of these over-achievers successful. She packs plenty of information into chunks that seem a bit short for a book, but are at least longer than today's standard magazine profiles. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of her profiles is the way many of them reveal the dynamics between two powerful leaders at companies like Microsoft and Intel. We [...] recommend this book as a brief introduction to the men and women whom history will record as the titans of turn-of-the-century technology.

Edward Bailey commands the field of "plain English" applied to business writing. This is a complete, modern--and highly readable--summary of everything you need to know about writing memo's letters and resumes and doing oral presentations. It lacks a section on e-mail. The resume and cover letter sections use examples which may not match for all industries, and the letter format (showing "Writer/typist") is outdated in the Internet Age.

Want to improve your writing? Want to improve your presentation skills? There's not a better book on the shelves! A must if your serious about your career. In only hours, your writing will improve -- colleagues will notice.

This is a great explanation of how to save money when buying furniture. However, I tried the number that Kimberly Causey suggests in her response to this fact and the people I spoke with said that the 1996 version of the book is the most up-to-date.

Either Kimberly is mistaken or the people selling her book are mistaken. Either way the only version I have found is the one that is 5 years old.

You can go down to North Carolina, it's said, and purchase furniture for a deep discount off showroom prices elsewhere in the US. Buy enough and the freight charges are well offset by the savings.

However, where to begin? Who to see? What to watch out for? The internet is surprisingly little help in providing clear information about buying furniture direct from manufacturers and outlets in North Carolina. This book is of some assistance, organizing information for you. The only caveat is like any other book dealing with retailers or outlets, the information becomes dated. Companies come and go. Websites go up and down. So I recommend this book to learn about the process of buying furniture this way, but you may find the information needs an occasional update.

With the help of this book, I have been able to purchase fabrics, furniture, and lighting fixtures all at considerable savings. The book was published in 1996 so some of the sources in the book are no longer in existence but there are enough resources to find whatever you need or want! This book is a definite must for the person who wants to do some decorating or remodeling and wants to save some money too! I highly recommend it!

The correct title is:The Global Education Industry : Lessons from Private Education in Developing Countries (Studies in Education, 7) by James Tooley

American readers may be surprised to learn that there is only one private university throughout the length and breadth of the United Kindom, and that is the University of Buckingham. I draw readers attention to this fact more to highlight the paucity of public policy in this area than anything else and to set out the basis of the review that follows.

The Global Education Industry is the summary of some of the results obtained from research carried out for the International Finance Corporation, which is the private sector funding subsidiary of the World Bank Group. Published here in conjunction with the London based, think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, this book is a major contributor to the ongoing debate across the industrialised world concerning the proper level of involvement of the state in education.

Education in England and Wales at least (Scotland has it's own educational sytem) was once the province of the private sector both charitable and for profit. This has been accounted in tremendous detail by E.G. West in his masterly study, Education and the state. Suffice it to say that one of the main, somewhat surprising conclusions of the book was that lower income groups were of the mind that education was a good well worth paying for and contributed significant sums so that their children coul better themselves. Indeed there is a significant tradition in England and Wales of the poor bettering themselves through study (see Rose, J 'The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes). The type of education provided was not good enough fpor the ruling classes who, in 1870, passed the Foster Act which introduced state education though the back door into the country.

Today, there is a small but flourishing private sector still in elementary and secondary education in England and Wales serving some seven per cent of the population to which ordinary people will send their children, often undergoing severe sacrifices to do so, but mostly the pupils are middle and upper incomes. The vast majority of the education sector through a variety of agencies is under the rigid control of the state.

This book, although pointing to the experience of private education in developing countries is primarily aimed at policy makers in the industrialised world, and in particular, Britain. It sets out clearly and categorically the case for the private provision of education in whatever sector that one chooses to select and shows clearly and consistently how high quality education can be provided without the dead hand of the state forcing conformity, uniformity and bureaurcracy upon schools and universities. It highlights the innovative nature of those private sector inn areas of curriculum development and lesson delivery. The focus on the most efficient use of resources also allows for staff development without any cost for staff and students alike.

The Global Education Industry presents an opportunity to public policy makers to improve the supply of education in the so called Western world while freeing up the resources of the state to carry out it's basic functions. It is not an attack on the state sector but a presentation of what can and may be. No doubt this will be opposed by academics and educationalists who have enjoyed a warm and cosy, even lucrative, relationship with the state over many years and who'se minds are closed to the endless possibilities of the market. The book's contents however, tell another story.

I should have heeded the warnings of the other reviewers. Paul Pilzer is a complete hack. This book is a complete waste of money.

Paul Zane Pilzer has done it again. "The Wellness Revolution" is an extraordinary book. It gives you a very factual view on one of the greatest lifestyle and business revolutions about to take place in our lives. I read Paul's two other books " God Wants you be Rich" and "Unlimited Wealth" which I enjoyed immensely, but I must admit that "The Wellness Revolution" is my favorite. It gave me a strong understanding of why the Wellness sector is such a great business opportunity as well as its implications in my personal life. It motivated me to make important changes to improve my health and personal well being. It is a very well researched book. I believe that if you do not read "The Wellness Revolution" you're missing out on the biggest shift about to take place in our lifetime.
Radames Soto-The Wall Street Journal

Pilzer has done it again.

Nobel-prize winning economist and economic advisor to two presidential administrations, Paul Zane Pilzer offers irrefutable proof that the next major boom in industry will lie in the industry of "wellness" as opposed to the $1.5 trillion dollar "sickness" industry.

It's also worth nothing that this is a book about WHY Americans aren't healthy and, surprisingly, it's for economic reasons. Pilzer shows compelling evidence that the $1 trillion food industry and the "healthcare" (sickness) industry fuel each other in propelling the average American to obesity and malnutrition.

This book also details how the baby boomers (who have been used for years as an indicator of where economic growth will occur) will create an entire industry that simply doesn't exist yet. The present $200 billion wellness industry is only the tip of the iceburg compared to what's coming.

One of my favorite parts of the book is concerning "Wellness Insurance" which shows a deceptively simple way to lower your annual insurance costs by over $3,000, have more money with which to purchase wellness products and services and STILL have the healthcare benefits that you need. Outstanding!

The information here is earth-shattering. And though it may be a bold statement, Pilzer shows inarguable proof that the coming "wellness revolution" may impact our lives more than the automobile and the personal computer.

Based on the information in this book, I believe the wellness revolution will dwarf the Internet millionaires and billionaires of the 90's.

Buy this book.

Derek Bok, a professor and formerly president of Harvard, writes about the pressures for commercialization that institutions of higher education face and are likely to face in the future. (Commercialization is defined as "efforts within the university to make profit from teaching, research and other campus activities.") In particular, Professor Bok has taken on three major themes: commercialization of athletics, research and education (online teaching, extension programs, etc.)

For one, this book is a useful reality check. Through scores of studies, Professor Bok dispels the myth that these three activities are profitable. Save few exceptions, these endeavors prove financially disastrous. More than that, there are the hidden dangers of compromising a university's academic standards and standing in the community. The call for a candid evaluation of the costs of commercialization is half of the book's theme.

The other half outlines prescriptions and guidelines for university presidents about how to handle these increased pressures. Professor Bok suggests revision to NCAA rules, and university oversight and care to limit the influence of corporate sponsors over research or the curriculum taught in schools.

In the end, "Universities in the Marketplace" is a reminder that universities are built around values: "the larger message of a liberal arts education [is] that there is more to life than making money." These values and the collaborative spirit, on which universities thrive, are threatened by the mistaken perception that there is money to be made by exploiting a school's name. The adherence to high standards is an old prescription for new pressures, and the one that Professor Bok suggests as the ultimate guideline for dealing with the threats of the future.

Active university presidents, wary of saying anything untoward for fear of losing potential donors, are non-stop cheerleaders for higher education. Former presidents have the opportunity for candor but rarely take advantage of it. To some degree, Derek Bok is an exception to the rule. In this measured book, he sometimes reveals the warts in the current state of higher ed. Far from a screed, this book's criticisms are tempered, laced with some humor, and carry with them a sense of optimism.

Bok is far too kind and makes repeated excuses for the shortcomings in contemporary leadership in higher education. In a revealing segment, he opines that if R.M. Hutchins was a university president today, he would not have the ability to strongly influence decisions concerning university athletics. Baloney. Hutchins had conviction and courage, qualities that allow leaders to create positive change today as well as they did in the previous century.

That said, Bok is not shy to point out some shortcomings in universities today: a neglect of undergraduates, corruption in athletics, and a tendency for money to derail educational and research missions. Many others have made similar criticisms. But most have lacked the credibility and visibility of Bok.

Reading between the lines one can sense that Bok sees little value in faculty governance and views the professorate as inherently myopic. Change must, in Bok's view, come from the top.

This book is designed as a gentle warning. It's in some ways a watered down version of a book from the 1990s by another former college president - Killing the Spirit by Page Smith. Smith's book contained more vitriol and was read widely, but had no impact on changing the system. Bok's book isn't having any impact either. It is being ignored because it tells a story that university leaders don't want to hear. This is a well-meaning book and it's a shame it isn't getting the attention it deserves.

Unfortunately, political and industrial interests are putting pressure (although not always willfully) on academia, to serve narrow business interests. The medical schools are already tainted by the funding power and controlling interests of the pharmaceutical industry as well as misguided university administrators (who think they can accept money and influence without getting over involved).

Just as many colleges have been compromised by how they run their athletic endeavors (e.g., admissions policies, lower admission standards, substandard courses such as "physics for football players") so to are universities endangered by selling off their scientific research as well as labeling nonscientific and trivial research as equivalent, nay superior to scholarly research. The main message of this book is (except for medical schools) it is not to late to say for universities and college administrats to say no to seemingly limited (but in the long run devastating) business and financial propositions that will debase the precious knowledge that has for two hundred years been the hallmark of a truly HIGHER EDUCATION--not EDUCATION for HIRE with great educational and social harm.

Bok's book (Bok is a former president of HARVARD) does explain that there are legitimate business partnerships and ventures for the modern university, but that they must be on guard so as not to throw out the baby ("scientific knowledge and the liberal arts") with the bath water ("the need for funding during bad economic times such as is the present case and reduced goverment funding").

If you are a professor, college administrator, or student, please buy and read this book. We don't want to see the great universities of the USA erode any further. Examples of this erosion are many poor quality courses delivered on the Internet, faculty who are not first rate scientific minds being given tenure, acceptance of commercial sponsorship for textbooks, advertisements in the classroom and even in urinals, etc.

In most cases it is probably not too late to stop the destructive short term relationships that many universities have misguidedly entered into. But if the fundamental problems are not addressed, the precious knowledge that has traditionally been the product of American universities will be replaced by pseudo-knowledge without social or individually enhancing knowledge that will contribute to the welfare and progress of the USA and the rest of the world.