What Happened to College?

The book everyone with a college-age kid should read. Katie Couric * Anyone who wants to understand the crisis in higher educationand help solve itshould read this book. Greg Lukianoff, author of The Coddling of the American Mind *

Everyone has an opinion about higher education, but ironically few scholars actually study it in a systematic way. What Happened to College? brings data and rigorous thinking to bear on the question of how a university system that is in many ways the envy of the world has lost the confidence of such a large share of the country. Matthew Yglesias

A sociologist who has been tracking the polarization of higher ed reveals how things went off track, what students are saying, and where we can find hope.

The campus culture wars are raging, but what's really going on behind the headlines? A decade after his landmark book on faculty politics, Neil Gross launched a massive investigation into student life on campus, interviewing over a hundred faculty, students, and administrators across the country and polling thousands more. He looked at liberal arts colleges, state schools, faith-based institutions, and elite universities and combed through studies tracking everything from dating habits and dwindling enrolment in the humanities to the liberal bias embedded in course syllabi.

What he found was startling: Undergraduates today are choosing their schools, their friends, their partners, their activitieseven their majorson the basis of their political beliefs to a degree unimaginable ten years ago, with the goal of interacting as little as possible with anyone whose views dont line up with their own. Popular campus dating apps invite you to swipe left if you dont like someones political profilea metaphor for todays college experience writ large. Instead of resisting this trend, faculty and administrators often encouraged it, creating a cloistered environment where students could avoid uncomfortable disagreement. It isn't so much that the faculty are indoctrinating studentsno one likes to be told what to think. Students, if anything, are indoctrinating themselves.

What Happened to College? paints a picture of an educational system in crisis and ripe for change. Grounding his analysis in sorely needed data, deftly debunking overstated claims, Gross offers vivid, fly-on-the-wall insights into what it's like to be a student today at one of our nation's top colleges. While some students will cheat their way to easy As, he he found places where open debate, intellectual inquiry and friendship across political lines still thrive. What are these campus communities doing right and how can prospective students find them? Can we teach students to disagree better? At a time of growing political stridency, nothing could be more important or more necessary.