A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education

This fresh and enlightening work from Labaree (Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling), a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, describes higher education in America as a consumer-driven, adaptable, stratified, expensive, and successful system. “I could easily write this book as a critique,” he notes, “focusing on the system’s failings, but instead I choose to write it as an appreciation, examining the distinctive institutional dynamics that enable it to be all things to all people.” The book includes a chronological overview of how higher education in the United States grew from a few old private colleges to a bonanza of universities, and an analysis of how the system has so successfully straddled public and private funding and governance, research and teaching priorities, and liberal and vocational aims. Labaree argues that the system both furthers social stratification and gives students real access to opportunity—but only if they can overcome the many barriers to completing a four-year degree. He explains why campus buildings often look like medieval cathedrals, how athletics are inextricable from the college degree, and why, “in order to become an academic powerhouse, the university also had to become a party school.” Labaree’s provocative view of higher education as a dysfunctional thing of beauty is likely to make anyone working in the field more than a little uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the book is chock-full of aha moments, and contributes an uncommon view to the larger discussion. (Mar.)