The Best Higher Education Books Of 2020

Interest in higher education soared in 2020 largely because of speculation about the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on American colleges. That interest was met with a crop of excellent books about several higher ed topics, with an emphasis - not surprisingly - on business models and admission practices. Here are ten of the year’s best.

The College Stress Test by Robert Zemsky, Susan Shaman, and Susan Campbell Baldridge presents a “stress test” for estimating universities’ financial health. Four variables are proposed —new student enrollments, net price, student retention, and external funding—to assess risks of institutional closures or mergers. The authors include a methodology (using IPEDS data) to calculate a given institution’s level of risk. Because the book preceded the pandemic, its projection that 10% or fewer of the nation's institutions were at high risk is probably too sanguine. In fact, after the pandemic, Zemsky later upped his severe risk estimate to 20%.

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit and the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Wall Street Journal reporters Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz examines the Varsity Blues scandal masterminded by Rick Singer. Korn and Levitz show how the ever-ambitious, always-hustling Singer developed his college counseling/coaching business and then exploited the college admissions rat-race, pulling in dozens of conspirators willing to lie, cheat, and bribe so their children would be admitted to the elite colleges of their dreams. 

They explore how Singer manipulated a system with too little oversight and too much greed, allowing rich kids to enter prestigious colleges through the “side doors” their families’ wealth pried open. It’s an indictment of the American obsession with elite colleges, but it’s also an examination of the anxiety that drove families to break the law and flaunt ethical principles. Although some of the children were unaware of the illegal machinations on their behalf, others were willing participants as were many key campus figures ready to reap the corrupt profits they sought to hide. In the end, it all fell apart, as the authors reveal in their coverage of the trials of the highest profile defendants.

The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor The Rich and Divide America by Anthony Carnevale, Peter Schmidt and Jeffrey Strohl. An impassioned critique of how colleges have failed to make good on their promise of being pathways to equality, too often compounding the problems that minority and low-income youth face in their lives.

The authors explore how class and race influence college access and completion, serving as obstacles rather than on-ramps to opportunity. And they point out how admissions, financial aid, and state funding policies rig the system for the privileged. Occasionally, the tone veers into polemic, but overall this book effectively dismantles the myths of meritocracy and its zero-sum consequences.

Bryan Alexander’s Academia Next identifies several higher education trends and then forecasts seven scenarios for how colleges might look in the future. Alexander wrote the book before the ultimate black swan - the coronavirus pandemic - appeared so it’s not included as a factor, even though he cites a pandemic as the kind of disruption that can produce a cascade of transformations.

Among the trends from which Alexander extrapolates are financial pressures, enrollment declines, demographic shifts, faculty changes, technological advances, credentialing alternatives, and geopolitical forces. Because of these drivers, colleges of the future could become attenuated, specialized, augmented, automated or thrown back to their pre-digital hey-day. Alexander envisions several different futures - some disturbing, some uplifting - and he does so with comprehensiveness and freshness.

The Small College Imperative by Mary B. Marcy, President of Dominican University of California, offers several strategies for small private colleges to cope with their major challenges. She outlines five emerging collegiate options — traditional, integrated, distinctive program, expansion, and distributed — and examines the advantages and limits of each. Institutions profiled include Agnes Scott College, California Lutheran University, Chapman University, Colgate University, Dominican University of California, Furman University, Southern New Hampshire University, Trinity Washington University, Utica College, and Whitman College.

Kent Garrett and Jeanne Ellsworth’s The Last Negroes At Harvard started as a video documentary but eventually evolved into a book. Part group memoir, part civil rights history, it traces the lives of 18 young men who entered Harvard in 1959. Garrett was one of those 18, He tracks down his classmates, and he and Ellsworth weave their stories into the historical unfolding of affirmative action and the civil rights movement.

Asked to summarize the book, Garrett said,” In 1959,...18 ‘Negro boys’ arrived to spend the next four years on the hallowed grounds of America’s bastion of white privilege, Harvard. I was one of them. Harvard changed us, and we changed Harvard. This book is our story.”

Who Gets In And Why is the much anticipated book from veteran higher education reporter Jeff Selingo, who embedded for several months in the admissions offices of three selective universities - Emery, Davidson and the University of Washington - to study how their admission decisions were reached. The institutional perspective is complemented by observing the college search process of three students - Grace, Nicole and Chris - who share the setbacks and triumphs of their application journeys. Along the way, Selingo provides perspective on topics such as institutional marketing and recruiting, enrollment management, college rankings, standardized testing, tuition discounting and financial aid, early decision, the Common Application, and legacy preferences.

Derek Bok’s Higher Expectations: Can Colleges Teach Students What They Need To Know in the 21st Century is the latest example of this highly respected college leader’s sober, but always encouraging, analyses of higher education. Bok uses the reform proposals of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) as his framework for improving undergraduate education. He considers the feasibility of colleges developing valued behaviors such as civic engagement, cross-cultural competence, “good” character, interpersonal abilities, and higher-order cognitive skills.

After reviewing evidence about various pedagogical innovations, Bok discusses the impediments that AAC&U-type reforms encounter. While these obstacles are formidable, Bok believes they must be addressed if colleges are to increase the value of education for students and society.

Michael Sandel offers a thought-provoking challenge to meritocratic assumptions in The Tyranny Of Merit: What’s Become Of The Common Good. He exposes the hubris of those who come out on top of meritocracies along with the humiliations of those who are left behind, and he offers suggestions for ways to think about success and failure that emphasize the role of luck, community and the dignity of all kinds of work. Sandel argues that an unquestioning belief in meritocracy corrodes civic sensibilities at the same time it creates the bitter resentments fueling current populist movements.

Although Sandel’s beef is not only, or primarily, with higher education, he’s particularly critical of the credentialism, prestige envy, and self-satisfaction that’s cultivated by the “sorting machine” of elite colleges (note: he works at one).

For anyone - like myself - who has championed the progressive’s creed about the value of more eduction, Sandel forces a reconsideration of the implications of that agenda. While the book is marred by bouts of repetitiveness and is not totally convincing, its moral framing makes you rethink a full embrace of what Sandel calls the “the rhetoric of rising, with its single-minded focus on education as the answer to inequality.”

Hidden Valley Road, by Robert Kolker, is not specifically about higher education, but it still makes the list. It’s the meticulously researched story of the Galvin family, where an astounding six of 12 children were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The intimate narrative entwines two themes: the heartbreaking, but resilient, struggles of the Galvins to cope with the chaos wrought by severe mental illness; and the slim progress made from decades of often contradictory theories and treatments of schizophrenia. Both themes implicate higher education. Several Galvin children went to college - some successfully, some not - and Kolker sympathetically depicts their triumphs and travails.

Honorable Mentions

• We Keep The Dead Close by Becky Cooper. An obsessive investigation of a gruesome murder at Harvard.
• Fulfilling the 21st Century Land-Grant Mission: Essays in Honor of The Ohio State University’s Sesquicentennial Commemoration, Stephen Gavazzi & David Staley (Eds.). A collection of essays commemorating Ohio State’s role as a leading land-grant university.
• The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education by Michael M. Crow and William B. Dabars. A call for comprehensively redesigning colleges and universities along a model that combine access and excellence.
• Sustainable. Resilient. Free. The Future of Public Higher Education by John Warner. A vision of public universities as an infrastructure that serves public-oriented missions and the changes necessary to make that happen.