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Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow (Eds.). Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 256 pp. Cloth: $24.95. ISBN: 1-4039-6921-3.
Declining by Degrees, edited by Richard Hersh and John Merrow, gathers college presidents, foundation officers, professors, social scientists, journalists, a novelist, and a pollster to examine pertinent issues that hinder the quality of American undergraduate education. The 15 book chapters are not organized in any particular order, but the themes that emerge throughout this volume are quite engaging. They include media coverage on postsecondary education, college admissions, curriculum reform, market-driven colleges, athletics, college choice and educational attainment, diversity and campus racial climates, philanthropy, and curriculum and campus life.
In the introduction, the editors acknowledge that they are not the first to express a deep concern about the status of undergraduate education and cite recent reports to support this point. Hersh and Merrow also posit that higher education remains mired in mediocrity because it overlooks student underachievement. While there are serious implications for the issues presented in subsequent chapters, the goal of this work "is to sound an alert and encourage a national conversation about higher education" (p. 9).
The first two chapters begin this conversation by exploring some external forces that contribute to the decline in undergraduate education. In Chapter 1, Gene Maeroff, former correspondent for the New York Times, reports that media coverage on higher education heavily lags behind that on K-12 education, thereby allowing higher education to escape scrutiny and criticism. Similarly, Deborah Wadsworth, former president of Public Agenda, a non-profit organization dedicated to unbiased public opinion research, writes about the public perception of higher education in Chapter 2. These chapters present largely ignored perspectives that...