Brendan Cantwell

Assessing the public university

What has become of the ‘public university’? The failure of the global financial system in late 2007 and the subsequent deep recession led to a massive retrenchment in higher education funding in many countries. Although the global recession has affected higher education systems around the world, the United Kingdom has experienced among the most significant higher education policy shifts in recent years. Fees have skyrocketed at most universities in England while state grants for degrees in the arts and humanities have been eliminated completely (Collini 2009). This is part of an international trend where universities that used to be low cost or free for student to attend are being privatised. Through this process the very purpose of higher education seems to have changed. Universities that were once sites of learning and discovery are now engines of economic competitiveness and places where students invest in their human capital.

The New Prudent Man: Financial-Academic Capitalism and Inequality in Higher Education

For over one hundred years university endowments in the United States had been managed according to the common law “prudent man” principle that imposed the relatively conservative fiduciary responsibility for capital preservation upon university trustees. Beginning in the 1970s the prudent man concept was re-imagined to call for the maximization of return on endowment holdings and increased attention to long-term capital accumulation. This chapter shows how the transformation of the prudent man principle coincided with restructuring in the broader political economy and especially the globalization of finance. It is argued that endowment management is now a form of financial-academic capitalism in which universities engage in market activities to generate profit in order to secure advantage over competitor institutions by amassing wealth, which is in turn associated with prestige and field status. This advantage is reinforced by historical positional and taxation policy. Wealth and status advantages result in inequality, and I argue that endowment management is one contributing factor to the steep and persistent stratification that characterizes higher education in the U.S. Institutional inequality presents implications for social opportunity and equity. The chapter concludes with policy recommendations related to institutional wealth management.

Ordering the global field of academic science: money, mission, and position

ABSTRACT Researchers have identified the emergence of a global field of academic science. In order to understand the dynamics of this field, this study used latent profile and regression techniques to analyze data gathered for a sample of 114 research universities from around the world. Sociological theory informed the framing and conceptualization of the study. Results demonstrated that leading research universities emphasized different areas of science, that science emphasis was patterned by geographic region, and that region, resource levels, and science emphasis all predicted status in the field. Implications for theory and future research were discussed.

Student Success as a Social Problem

In the United States of America, a significant proportion of the age-cohort enroll in higher education but only about one-half of students who start a degree program graduate. Given low completion rates, comprehensive reform efforts seek to improve student success. This article considers the social foundations and policy conditions that shape the student success reform movement in the USA . It argues that the American social compact, which relies on hard work and education as a pathway for social mobility, decentralized governance structure, and the role of philanthropy in the higher education sector all influence the student success reform movement.