Mind Which Gap?
Since the early nineteenth century, social reformers have been concerned with how different groups fare in school. In the early … Read More
education
Anti-Social Debts
The current student debt burden is an unsustainable outcome of the government's abdication of responsibility to secure access to higher education. Andrew Ross analyses the factors behind the funding crisis and suggests some ways to reestablish an affordable education system. Read More
The Not-So-Pink Ivory Tower
Sociologist Ann Mullen explores what it means that women now earn the majority of bachelor’s degrees. Rather than seeing this as a sign of a “male crisis” in higher education, this article concludes that the gender integration of higher education is far from complete. Read More
Teaching to Distraction
The classroom is a social space, and how students experience and perceive that space shapes how they approach their classrooms and what they do in them. Margaret Austin Smith uses ethnographic data of college students' classroom experiences to demonstrate the degree of importance understanding students' ways of knowing the classroom has on the effectiveness of teaching and learning relationships. Read More
Degree by Default
In past generations, college was thought to be a site for higher learning in America. Yet April Yee's ethnographic research finds that few undergraduates are enrolling for the pursuit of knowledge anymore; instead, students are going to college simply because they believe they must have a degree to have a future in our society. Read More
Breakthrough Books: Education
Scholars sound off about the books that shaped how we think about education. Read More
Passing on Faculty Roles, Cui Bono?
Sociologist Helen Moore discusses how capitalization of academic faculty roles raises questions of whether or not we have adequate theories to assess such changes. She argues that labor market fragmentation, racialization, and gendered faculty roles provide new frameworks for these theories. Read More
The (Mis)Education of Monica and Karen
Monica and Karen, two typical in-state students starting college at a mid-tier public university in the Midwest, encounter organizational arrangements best designed to serve affluent, out-of-state partiers who can afford to pay full freight. Sociologists Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth A. Armstrong discuss how Monica and Karen's stories reveal the great mismatch between the needs of most college students and what many four-year residential universities offer. Read More
What Would Jefferson Do?
Sociologist Andrea Press discusses the recent firing of President Teresa Sullivan, the first woman and first sociologist serving this role at the University of Virginia, by Helen Dragas, the first woman rector directing University of Virginia's Board of Visitors. She analyzes the role of gender in these events and also examines the importance of social media in relation to facilitating faculty governance. Read More
The Education Assembly Line
Experts weigh in on the rise of corporatizing trends in higher education today. Johann N. Neem, Brenda Forster, Sheila Slaughter, Richard Vedder, and Tressie McMillan Cottom and Sara Goldrick-Rab help us understand these trends and their effects on higher education. Read More
