Article

Crisis Writing on the California State University: Extended Review Article

The diagnosis of a crisis in United States higher education, though certainly predating the twenty-first century (Dorn 2017), has become particularly pronounced in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Indeed, as Bowser suggests in the opening pages of The Abandoned Mission in Public Higher Education: The Case of the California State University (2017), the Great Recession birthed a veritable cottage industry of "crisis writers." The book of the genre, as its author tells us (Blumenstyk 2020), is Goldie Blumenstyk's American Higher Education in Crisis? What Everyone Needs to Know (2014). Billing her work as a "primer" aimed at a wide audience -- the title itself tells us everyone must know -- Blumenstyk identifies and examines the main trends she says have led U.S. higher education to its current state of rot. Prominent among the trends she examines are (1) an increasingly diverse body of students that is accompanied by new, unique sets of needs to which an ill-prepared, if not inflexible, faculty is unable to respond; (2) soaring tuitions, stemming from a combination of state disinvestment and outdated, unsustainable business models, that burden students with unsustainable levels of debt and, when considered in aggregate, might well form the next financial bubble; and (3) racial and economic stratification that continues to grow within and between campuses across the country.

Items in ScholarWorks are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.