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Walter W. McMahon. Higher Learning, Greater Good: The Private and Social Benefits of Higher Education. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 432 pp. Cloth: $45.00 ISBN-13: 978-0801890536.
"Higher education markets do not function well if there is poor information," says Walter McMahon (p. 176); and with this book, he provides evidence that the information individuals and governments work with is poor. He corrects that deficiency and makes many public policy recommendations to ensure that the problems caused by poor information are likewise corrected.
This extraordinary book patiently, thoughtfully, and thoroughly provides the conceptual framework for understanding the higher education market, the empirical findings about what that market produces and the policy prescriptions needed to make it work better in the future. Walter McMahon's summary and synthesis of both his research and that of others is a marvelous capstone to his career and a great service to higher education.
McMahon opens with chapters intended to contextualize for the reader the detailed analyses that follows. My sole criticism of the book is that these first two chapters would have served the reader and the argument better had they been terser, launching the reader more quickly into the extraordinary presentation of evidence on returns on higher education that follow. While the arguments and evidence in these two chapters have worth, the path-breaking value to most will be found in the chapters on the direct market returns, nonmarket returns, and social returns that follow.
The third chapter focuses on the individual and social rates of return on higher education and the relationship between higher education and economic growth....