Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education

Radical Teacher, Fall, 2006 by Vincent Serravallo

SHAKESPEARE, EINSTEIN, AND THE BOTTOM LINE: THE MARKETING OF HIGHER EDUCATION

By David Kirp. Harvard University Press, 2004

"For better or worse--for better and worse, really--American higher education is being transformed by both the power and the ethic of the marketplace." So David Kirp summarizes the issue examined in his enthralling multi-case critique of the role of money in U.S. higher education. And, it is the "worse" results of the marketing of higher learning that receive nearly all of the attention in this book's numerous and elegantly written narratives. Ultimately for Kirp, it is the demise of academe's stewardship of the public good that marks the transformation he chronicles. Certainly, this is not the first or only book to confront the commercialization of the academy and uncover its threats to the common good, but it offers several strengths that set it apart from the mounting number of related works and make it a very good choice for use in the classrooms of various undergraduate college levels, or as a reference book on the horrors of the market ethic on campus. Readers will soon see, however, that the book's effectiveness owes to its descriptive rather than analytical powers of the narratives.

Kirp's stint as acting dean of Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy inspired the book The trigger event, he implies, was his meeting with the Council of the Deans wherein the academic administrators spent forty-five minutes discussing the correct and incorrect use of the school's mascot. As I did countless times in each chapter, educators of all ranks and across the range of academic work settings will undoubtedly draw comparisons to their personal circumstances. Given this book's breadth, there is something in it for nearly everyone.

The features distinguishing the book from others in this field include its fine writing, the many different forms of marketing encroachments studied, and the diversity of colleges and universities inviting or forced to accept the market ethic. Moreover, all positions within academe's organization, from trustees to faculty, are exposed for their embrace or surrender to the market; even students, for they--the ones from wealthy families, that is--bypass their assigned guidance counselors and hire very expensive private consultants from companies like Ivywise to turn their unremarkable resumes into admissions passes.

The good story telling is aided by the interviews Kirp and his graduate student assistants conducted with faculty, administrators, students and trustees for each chapter. The colleges and universities examined are big in number (sixteen) and diverse in type. While most attention is given to the prestigious and private institutions, Kirp includes research universities, traditional liberal arts colleges, for-profits, distance learning schools, and law schools. The book's accounts include techniques for recruiting star students, such as curriculum changes, more fun on campus, and admissions schemes; recruitment of star faculty; financial accountability; academic privatization and outsourcing; and Internet instruction as well as university-industry partnerships. Thus, given its breadth and prose, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottam Line will prove effective for various courses in sociology and organizational studies as well as education.

It also offers practical uses. For college-bound seniors and first-year college students, the beginning chapters expose many of the academy's enrollment-boosting ploys. "Enrollment managers" are more likely to accept early-admissions candidates, but these students' financial aid package will be smaller than those who wait. This is because less financial aid to early-admissions students, whose enrollment is a certainty if admitted, allows the schools to use more money to woo the academically stronger but undecided candidates. As the case at Dickinson College demonstrates, the aid is less distributed on the basis of need, and inequality results: Dickinson brought in more students from richer families while the percentage of first-generation college freshmen dropped by almost one-half from 1999 to 2002. In another tactic, Princeton went so far as to hack into Yale's computers to compete for their A-list of candidates, including George W. Bush's niece. Enrollment managers engage in this competition over star students to improve the market position of the school: the high-caliber students attract other highly-valued students, which helps lure acclaimed professors, which then helps increase alumni donations, and ultimately the school climbs higher in the U.S. News and World Report's "America's Best Colleges" survey. New York University, Boston University, Harvard and Colby College are some of the schools that knowingly inflated their students' SAT scores for that journal. In another method of gaining high ratings, Emory University and Franklin and Marshall deny their very best applicants who the enrollment managers believe will not enroll if admitted, thus building their image as highly selective.