![]() | The Market Imperative Subjects: EDUCATION / Educational Policy & Reform / General.; BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Education.; EDUCATION / Higher.; Business and education; Universities and colleges; Universities and colleges; Education Higher; Thinking about American higher education as an economic market changes everything. It is no surprise that college tuition and student debt are on the rise. Universities no longer charge tuition to simply cover costs. They are market enterprises that charge whatever the market will bear. Institutional ambition, along with increasing competition for students, now shape the economics of higher education. In The Market Imperative , Robert Zemsky and Susan Shaman argue that too many institutional leaders and policy makers do not understand how deeply the consumer markets they promoted have changed American higher education. Instead of functioning as a single integrated industry, higher education is in fact a collection of segmented and more or less separate markets. These markets have their own distinctive operating constraints and logics, especially regarding price. But those most responsible for federal higher education policy have made a muck of the enterprise, while state policy making has all but disappeared, the victim of weak imaginations, insufficient funding, and an aversion to targeted investment. Robert Zemsky is a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania. The chair of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education, he is the author of Checklist for Change: Making American Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise . Susan Shaman was a senior planning officer at the University of Pennsylvania from 1982 to 1997. |
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