Two decades into the twenty-first century, our nation's colleges and universities no longer embrace a clear and convincing definition of the purpose of a college education. Instead, most institutions have fallen prey to a default purpose in which college is essentially workforce preparation for jobs that already exist, while students are viewed as…

This book takes a holistic approach to pedagogy and argues that the purpose of education is to educate the student's whole personality including cognitive, social, and moral domains. The four sections and twelve chapters address the current pedagogical challenges in basic and higher education in international contexts. The authors describe the…

U.S. strength in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines has formed the basis of innovations, technologies, and industries that have spurred the nation's economic growth throughout the last 150 years. Universities are essential to the creation and transfer of new knowledge that drives innovation. This knowledge moves…

The National Science Foundation funded a synthesis study on the status, contributions, and future direction of discipline-based education research (DBER) in physics, biological sciences, geosciences, and chemistry. DBER combines knowledge of teaching and learning with deep knowledge of discipline-specific science content. It describes the…

The development of a national database describing the real undergraduate curriculum, the courses that college and university students actually take, is reported. Based on analyses of student transcripts from 30 public and private institutions of varying sizes, this report provides a rationale for the database; analyzes student choices across the…

The results of several studies of the humanities and social sciences in undergraduate engineering education are presented and discussed. The first chapter explains the value of humanities and social sciences coursework and describes briefly some of the obstacles confronting efforts to improve it. The second chapter summarizes the findings of two…

This book discusses, from a British perspective, the ways in which higher education, and particularly the teaching of undergraduates, responds to the influences of the environment of which the labor market is a major element. It is based on studies made between 1984 and 1987 of 49 departments in nine higher education institutions: four…

This book advances an argument for how to restructure public higher education in the United States. Among the authors' suggestions are: instituting an open-admissions policy to allow more people an opportunity for a college education; encouraging high school students to delay their college education until they are emotionally and academically…

This book presents the extensive results of a study of how students are affected by their college experiences. Chapter 1 discusses the question of how to assess the impact of the college experience and outlines the overall design of the study. Chapter 2 describes each of the 135 college environmental measures and 57 "student involvement" measures…

This history of the "polytechnic experiment" covers the period from the establishment of a binary British higher education policy in the mid-1960s to the passage in 1992 of the Further and Higher Education Act, which abolished the binary policy and the polytechnic sector, thus enabling the polytechnics in England and Wales to acquire the…