Today I'm posting a wonderful new essay by Daniel Markovits about the social consequences of the new meritocracy, which was just published in the latest issue of Hedgehog Review. Here's a link to the original. As you may recall, last fall I posted a piece about his book, The Meritocracy Trap. In this essay, Markovits … Continue reading Markovits: Schooling in the Age of Human Capital
Category: Higher Education
How Credentialing Theory Explains the Extraordinary Growth in US Higher Ed in the 19th Century
Today I am posting a piece I wrote in 1995. It was the foreword to a book by David K. Brown, Degrees of Control: A Sociology of Educational Expansion and Occupational Credentialism. I have long been interested in credentialing theory, but this is the only place where I ever tried to spell out in detail … Continue reading How Credentialing Theory Explains the Extraordinary Growth in US Higher Ed in the 19th Century
The Lust for Academic Fame: America’s Engine for Scholarly Production
This post is an analysis of the engine for scholarly production in American higher education. The issue is that the university is a unique work setting in which the usual organizational incentives don't apply. Administrators can't offer much in the way of power and money as rewards for productive faculty and they also can't do … Continue reading The Lust for Academic Fame: America’s Engine for Scholarly Production
Nobel prizes are great, but college football is why American universities dominate the globe
This post is a reprint of a piece I published in Quartz in 2017. Here's a link to the original. It's an effort to explore the distinctively populist character of American higher education. The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that US colleges and universities have managed to generate is … Continue reading Nobel prizes are great, but college football is why American universities dominate the globe
Hausmann: The Education Myth
In this post I reprint a piece by Ricardo Hausmann (an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School), which was published in Project Syndicate in 2015. Here's a link to the original. If you can't get past the paywall, here's a link to a PDF. What I like about this piece is the way Hausmann challenges a central … Continue reading Hausmann: The Education Myth
The Exceptionalism of American Higher Education
This post is an op-ed I published on my birthday (May 17) in 2018 on the online international opinion site, Project Syndicate. The original is hidden behind a paywall; here are PDFs in English, Spanish, and Arabic. It's a brief essay about what is distinctive about the American system of higher education, drawn from my … Continue reading The Exceptionalism of American Higher Education
Escape from Rome: How the Loss of Empire Spurred the Rise of Modernity — and What this Suggests about US Higher Ed
This post is a brief commentary on historian Walter Scheidel's latest book, Escape from Rome. It's a stunningly original analysis of a topic that has long fascinated scholars like me: How did Europe come to create the modern world? His answer is this: Europe became the cauldron of modernity and the dominant power in the … Continue reading Escape from Rome: How the Loss of Empire Spurred the Rise of Modernity — and What this Suggests about US Higher Ed
Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in Scholarship
This post is an overview of my life as a scholar. I presented an oral version in my job talk at Stanford in 2002. The idea was to make sense of the path I'd taken in my scholarly writing up to that point. What were the issues I was looking at and why? How did … Continue reading Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in Scholarship
Research Universities and the Public Good
This post is a review essay of a new book called Research Universities and the Public Good. It appeared in the current issue of American Journal of Sociology. Here's a link to a PDF of the original. Research Universities and the Public Good: Discovery for an Uncertain Future By Jason Owen-Smith. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University … Continue reading Research Universities and the Public Good
US Higher Education and Inequality: How the Solution Became the Problem
This post is a paper I wrote last summer and presented at the University of Oslo in August. It's a patchwork quilt of three previously published pieces around a topic I've been focused on a lot lately: the role of US higher education -- for better and for worse -- in creating the new American … Continue reading US Higher Education and Inequality: How the Solution Became the Problem
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 