Understanding Higher Education in the US and Western Countries

This text provides a framework for understanding higher education in the US and other western countries since the 1970s whereby the logic of the marketplace has increasingly come to dominate all arenas and, in context, the education system. The author calls this process "commodification" and he describes the transformation of universities in the US and elsewhere as they attempt to accommodate the enforced changes on their academic lives and those of their students.

The book chronicles changes with the increasing focus on career and the movement towards the instrumental functions of education; the financial crisis and the development of a more corporate approach to education; of consumption that produce universities heavy with expensive, well-equipped and powerful administrations and decreasing numbers of ever more disenfranchised faculty.