Students at Skyline College Library. Credit: Marisa Thigpen.
With so many sources available from the Library and the internet, we've curated a collection of films, articles and books to get you started. Did you find other important sources you think should be included here? Let us know! -Jessica <silversharpj@smccd.edu>
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Rossi, Andrew. 2014. Ivory Tower. Andrew Rossi.
"As tuition rates spiral beyond reach and student loan debt passes $1 trillion...Ivory Tower asks: Is college worth the cost? From the halls of Harvard, to public colleges in financial crisis, to Silicon Valley, filmmaker Andrew Rossi assembles an urgent portrait of a great American institution at the breaking point. Through interviews profiled at Arizona State, Cooper Union, and Sebastian Thrun's Udacity...[the film] reveals how colleges in the United States, long regarded as leaders in higher education, came to embrace a business model that often promotes expansion over quality learning."
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Mims, Steve. 2016. Starving the Beast. Bill Banowsky. (Streaming free on Kanopy: login using you SMCCD credentials).
"STARVING THE BEAST examines the on-going power struggle on college campuses across the nation as political and market-oriented forces push to disrupt and reform America's public universities. The film documents a philosophical shift that seeks to reframe public higher education as a "value proposition" to be borne by the beneficiary of a college degree rather than as a "public good" for society. Financial winners and losers emerge in a struggle poised to profoundly change public higher education. The film focuses on dramas playing out at the University of Wisconsin, University of Virginia, University of North Carolina, Louisiana State University, University of Texas and Texas A&M." - Steve Mims.
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Viallet, Jean-Robert. 2016. Higher Education: The New Global Economic War. Java Films. (Streaming free on Kanopy: login using you SMCCD credentials).
"With the birth of the knowledge society, higher education is booming. There were 13 million university students in 1960. In 2015, their ranks had swollen to nearly 200 million. The number of students attending university is exploding around the globe, as a gigantic global student market is being forged… It’s a simple fact: for the past two decades, the new wealth producing champions have been business executives and members of the intellectual and scientific professions.
Universities are operating in the world’s most competitive knowledge economy. They are waging a ferocious battle to attract the brightest minds from around the globe. We delve into the key seats of decision-making, where money and politics intermingle, and show the deep cultural divide between a lucrative Anglo-Saxon model of funding and the universal independent European model. We also document the emergence of a new class of over-educated and over-indebted workers. Who really benefits from this heightened competition? Just how much debt should students take on? What is the real price for our societies? Is higher education set to be a big market?"
"College costs are insane these days. One answer is FREE COLLEGE paid for by the government, which many liberals and even some conservatives are getting behind. But, “free” college really isn’t free. That money has to come from somewhere. Is free college really as good as good as it sounds?"
This film includes closed captioning. Transcript available here.
Skyline College students: To access e-books, when prompted, log in using the same credentials you use for Canvas/SMCCD email.
Free City! The Fight for San Francisco's City College and Education for All by
In 2012, the accreditor sanctioned City College of San Francisco, one of the biggest and best community colleges in the country, and a year later proposed terminating its accreditation, leading to a state takeover. Free City! follows the multipronged strategies of the campaign and the diverse characters that carried them out. Teachers, students, labor unions, community groups, public officials, and concerned individuals saved a treasured public institution as San Francisco's working-class communities of color battled the gentrification that was forcing them out of the city. And they pushed back against the national "reform" agenda of corporate workforce training that drives students towards debt and sidelines lifelong learning and community service programs. Combining analysis with narrative, Free City! offers a case study in the power of positive vision and solution-oriented organizing and a reflection on what education can and should be.
The Economics of Higher Education in the United States by
In The Economics of Higher Education in the United States, editors Thomas Adam and A. Burcu Bayram have assembled five essays, adapted from the fifty-second annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture Series, that focus on the increasing cost of college--a topic that causes great anxiety among students, parents, faculty, administrators, legislators, and taxpayers. Essays focus on the funding of colleges, the funding of professional schools, and the provision of scholarships and student loans for undergraduate students to reveal the impact of money on the structure of institutions of higher education and the organization of colleges. The cost of higher education has risen dramatically as both states and the federal government have significantly lowered their contributions to offset that cost. With rising tuition and cost of living--on top of a growing student population--too many graduates find themselves in financial trouble after earning their undergraduate degree. Mounting student debt prevents an increasing number of young professionals from embarking on the very life for which their education was supposed to prepare them. How have we come from a political environment in which higher education was perceived as a public good, normally free to the user, to an environment in which higher education is seen as a privilege subject primarily to market forces? The Economics of Higher Education in the United States offers a desperately needed analysis in an attempt to understand and tackle this looming problem.
Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free by
Universities tend to be judged by the test scores of their incoming students and not on what students actually learn once they attend these institutions. While shared tests and surveys have been developed, most schools refuse to publish the results. Instead, they allow such publications as U.S. News & World Report to define educational quality. In order to raise their status in these rankings, institutions pour money into new facilities and extracurricular activities while underfunding their educational programs. In Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free, Robert Samuels argues that many institutions of higher education squander funds and mislead the public about such things as average class size, faculty-to-student ratios, number of faculty with PhDs, and other indicators of educational quality. Parents and students seem to have little knowledge of how colleges and universities have been restructured over the past thirty years. Samuels shows how research universities have begun to function as giant investment banks or hedge funds that spend money on athletics and administration while increasing tuition costs and actually lowering the quality of undergraduate education. In order to fight higher costs and lower quality, Samuels suggests, universities must reallocate these misused funds and concentrate on their core mission of instruction and related research. Throughout the book, Samuels argues that the future of our economy and democracy rests on our ability to train students to be thoughtful participants in the production and analysis of knowledge. If leading universities serve only to grant credentials and prestige, our society will suffer irrevocable harm. Presenting the problem of how universities make and spend money, Samuels provides solutions to make these important institutions less expensive and more vital. By using current resources in a more effective manner, we could even, he contends, make all public higher education free.
