Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education

What happens to the liberal arts and science education when universities attempt to sell it as a form of job training? In Lowering Higher Education, a follow-up to their provocative 2007 book Ivory Tower Blues, James E. Cote and Anton L. Allahar explore the subverted ‘idea of the university’ and the forces that have set adrift the mission of these institutions. Cote and Allahar connect the corporatization of universities to a range of contentious issues within higher education, from lowered standards and inflated grades to the overall decline of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences instruction.

also offers recommendations that have the potential to reinvigorate liberal education.