Buying the best

Name: Buying the best
Author: Charles T. Clotfelter
ISBN: 0691026424

by Charles T. Clotfelter (1996)

Read Free Sample Buy on Amazon Audible Free Trial

About this book

Since the early 1980s the rapidly increasing cost of college, together with what many see as inadequate attention to teaching, has elicited a barrage of protest. Buying the Best looks at the realities behind these criticisms - at the economic factors that are in fact driving the institutions that have been described as machines without brakes. In designing his study, Charles Clotfelter examines the escalation in spending in the arts and sciences at four elite institutions: Harvard, Duke, Chicago, and Carleton. He argues that the rise in costs has less to do with increasing faculty salaries or lowered productivity than with a broad-based effort to improve quality, provide new services to students, pay for large investments in new facilities and equipment (including computers), and insure access for low-income students through increasingly expensive financial aid. In Clotfelter's view spiraling costs arise from the institutions' lofty ambitions and are made possible by steadily intensifying demand for places in the country's elite colleges and universities. Only if this demand slackens will universities be pressured to make cuts or pursue efficiencies. Buying the Best is the first study to make use of the internal historical records of specific institutions, as opposed to the frequently unreliable aggregate records made available by the federal government for the use of survey researchers. As such, it has the virtue of allowing Clotfelter to draw much more realistic comparative conclusions than have hitherto been reported. While acknowledging the obvious drawbacks of the small sample, Clotfelter notes that the institutions studied are significant for the disproportionate influence they, and comparable elite institutions, exercise in research and in the training of future leaders.

Setting / LocationGlobal

Story EraContemporary / Future

Protagonist / CoreBuying the best Lead Character

Themes & Moods

Business & Finance College costs Education, Higher Educational surveys Finance Higher Education Contemporary / Future

Readers who enjoyed this also loved

The mobile academy

Clark N. Quinn

"This vital resource contains a theory-based and practice-based guide that explores the ways mobile devices can be used in higher education. It offers instructors, instructional designers, and administrators to systematically integrate mobile devices into their courses and other academic support services to facilitate the learning outcomes and student success they desire. Specifically, the book covers the use of text messages, mobile web, ebooks, and mobile apps, as applied to: the administration, classroom content, assessment, communication, and more. The book contextualizes mobile learning as a tool for institutional management"-- Provided by publisher.

Climate policy foundations

William C. Whitesell

"This book provides a thorough grounding in the science and economics of climate policy issues and draws key lessons from the longer experiences of central banks in grappling with related challenges. Findings and controversies of climate history and the effects of human activities on climate are reviewed. The author describes similarities in risk management approaches for climate and monetary policy. Overall goals and frameworks for addressing climate change risks are assessed. Command-and-control and market-based options are compared (including performance standards, taxes, and cap-and-trade). Market-based approaches sometimes require a choice between prices and quantities as policy instruments. However, the author discusses how techniques of central bank interest rate management can be adapted in a hybrid climate policy approach to achieve environmental goals while making carbon prices predictable and also ensuring well-functioning carbon markets. Key lessons are offered for improving existing and future national and international climate policy architectures"--

Category killers

Robert Spector

"In Category Killers, veteran journalist Robert Spector argues that retail giants have done more than dramatically alter our buying experience. They've also ingeniously rewritten the retail playbook and, in the process, forever altered cultural and economic factors from traffic patterns and land-use legislation to taxation, migration, and employment." "Spector traces the rise and influence - for better and worse - of category killers from pioneer Toys "R" Us to Home Depot to Starbucks. He also examines the impact of warehouse clubs like Costco and Sam's Club, and every retailer's ultimate nemesis, Wal-Mart. Based on decades of research and investigative reporting, Category Killers provides insights into the past, present, and future of retailing."--Jacket.

The World Is Flat -A Brief History OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Tuomasi Fulideman zhu

When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, what will they say was the most crucial development at the dawn of the 21st century--the attacks of 9/11, or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, and giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalization? And with this "flattening" of the globe, has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner? Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt.