The Impacts of Neoliberalism on US Community Colleges

The Impacts of Neoliberalism on US Community Colleges
Author: Greg Sethares
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 122
Release: 2020-03-26
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000069621

Focusing on community colleges as a unique structure within American higher education, this text investigates the specific ways in which these institutions have been impacted by a global increase in neoliberal education policies. Analyzing the effects neoliberalism has had on community colleges, the text charters discourse relating the erosion of faculty voice in academic governance, and decision making; the vocationalization of curriculum; and the impact that these factors have had on the ability of community colleges to provide students with an education that supports a democratic society. Exposing a movement away from the historical aims of community-based education, the text evidences a hijacking of community colleges to serve the objectives of the corporate elite. There has been a decline in community college faculty engagement in shared governance and their loss of recognition as academic and curricular leaders, and the book discusses the potential for redistribution of decision-making power back toward faculty. This text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, professionals and policy-makers in the fields of Higher Education, Education Policy and Politics, Sociology of Education, Higher Education Management and Education Politics.

Understanding Neoliberal Rule in Higher Education

Understanding Neoliberal Rule in Higher Education
Author: Mark Abendroth
Publisher: IAP
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015-06-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1681231271

The word fundamentalism usually conjures up images of religions and their most zealous followers. Much less often the word appears in connection with political economy. The phrase “free market” gives the connotation that capitalism is freedom. Neoliberalism is the rise of global free-market fundamentalism. It reaches into nearly every aspect of our daily lives as it seeks to dominate and eliminate the last vestiges of public domains through wanton privatization and deregulation. It degrades all that is public. The good news is that a global community of resistance continues to struggle against neoliberal oppression. Formal and informal education entities contribute to these struggles, offering visions and strategies for creating a better future. The purpose of this volume is twofold. Several contributors will highlight how the neoliberal agenda is impacting educational policy formation, teaching and learning, and relationships between institutions of higher education and communities. Other contributors will highlight how the global community has gradually become conscious of the ideological doctrine and how it is responsible for human suffering and misery. The volume is needed because the growing body of educational research linked to exploring the impact of neoliberalism on education and society fails to provide conceptual or historical understanding of this ideology. It is also an important scholarly intervention because it provides insights as to why educators, scholars, and other global citizens have challenged the intrusion of market forces over life inside universities and colleges. Teaching faculty, research faculty, and anyone who yearns to understand what is behind the debilitating trend of commercial forces subverting humanizing educational projects would benefit from this volume. Activists, educators, youth, and scholars who seek strategies and visions for building democratic higher education and a more democratic society would consider this volume essential reading.

Community Colleges and New Universities under Neoliberal Pressures

Community Colleges and New Universities under Neoliberal Pressures
Author: John S. Levin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2017-02-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1137480203

This book examines seven higher education organizations, exploring their interconnected lines: organizational change and organizational stability. These lines are nested within historical, social, cultural, and political contexts of two nations—the US and Canada—two provinces and three states: Alberta, British Columbia, California, Hawai’i, and Washington. The author studies the development of the community college and the development of the university from community college origins, bringing to the forefront these seven individual stories. Addressing continuity and discontinuity and identity preservation and identity change, as well as individual organizations’ responses to government policy, Levin analyzes and illuminates those policies with neoliberal assumptions and values.

Economic Inequality, Neoliberalism, and the American Community College

Economic Inequality, Neoliberalism, and the American Community College
Author: Patrick Sullivan
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2017-05-11
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3319442848

This book aims to deepen public understanding of the community college and to challenge our longstanding reliance on a deficit model for defining this important, powerful, and transformative institution. Featuring a unique combination of data and research, Sullivan seeks to help redefine, update, and reshape public perception about community colleges. This book gives serious attention to student voices, and includes narratives written by community college students about their experiences attending college at an open admissions institution. Sullivan examines the history of the modern community college and the economic model that is driving much of the current discussion in higher education today. Sullivan argues that the community college has done much to promote social justice and economic equality in America since the founding of the modern community college in 1947 by the Truman Commission.

The Impacts of Neoliberal Discourse and Language in Education

The Impacts of Neoliberal Discourse and Language in Education
Author: Mitja Sardoč
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2021-03-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000360636

This edited collection combines quantitative content and critical discourse analysis to reveal a shift in the rhetoric used as part of the neoliberal agenda in education. It does so by analysing, uncovering, and commenting on language as a central tool of education. Focussing on vocabulary, metaphors, and slogans used in strategy documents, advertising, policy, and public discourse, the text illustrates how concepts such as justice, opportunity, well-being, talent, and disadvantage have been hijacked by educational institutes, governments, and universities. Showing how neoliberalism has changed discourses about education and educational policy, these chapters trace issues such as anti-intellectualism, commercialization, meritocracy, and an erasure of racial difference back to a contradictory growth in egalitarian rhetoric. Given its global scope, this volume offers a timely intervention in the studies of neoliberalism and education by developing a holistic vision of how the language of neoliberalism has changed how we think about education. It will prove to be an essential resource for scholars and researchers working at the intersections of education, policymaking, and neoliberalism.

Academic Irregularities

Academic Irregularities
Author: Liz Morrish
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2019-08-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317201817

This volume serves as a critical examination of the discourses at play in the higher education system and the ways in which these discourses underpin the transmission of neoliberal values in 21st century universities. Situated within a Critical Discourse Analysis-based framework, the book also draws upon other linguistic approaches, including corpus linguistics and appraisal analysis, to unpack the construction and development of the management style known as managerialism, emergent in the 1990s US and UK higher education systems, and the social dynamics and power relations embedded within the discourses at the heart of managerialism in today’s universities. Each chapter introduces a particular aspect of neoliberal discourse in higher education and uses these multiple linguistic approaches to analyze linguistic data in two case studies and demonstrate these principles at work. This multi-layered systematic linguistic framework allows for a nuanced exploration of neoliberal institutional discourse and its implications for academic labor, offering a critique of the managerial system in higher education but also a larger voice for alternative discursive narratives within the academic community. This important work is a key resource for students and scholars in applied linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, sociology, business and management studies, education, and cultural studies.

Nontraditional Students and Community Colleges

Nontraditional Students and Community Colleges
Author: J. Levin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2007-09-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0230607284

Focusing on non-traditional students in higher education institutions, this new book from renowned scholar John Levin examines the extent to which community college students receive justice both within their institution and as an outcome of their education.

Community College Student Mental Health

Community College Student Mental Health
Author: Amanda O. Latz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2023-09-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 147586017X

Community college student mental health is a critical topic among community college leaders, faculty, and staff. Mental health concerns among community college students are more prevalent and more pronounced than among students at four-year institutions. The recent pandemic has further amplified students’ mental health concerns. Poor mental health can negatively affect student success outcomes such as persistence within courses, grade point average, and credential completion. Even though the research in this area is growing, additional work is necessary to fully grasp the scope and details of the issue. Within this book, Latz outlines the contours of the issue by explaining what is already known. She then uses data from a study involving interviews with community college faculty to further explain the issue from their unique and important vantage points. Readers will learn about both the professional lives of community college faculty and their experiences with and perspectives of their students, many of whom navigate mental health issues. The book is concluded with robust recommendations for community college leaders who are seeking ways to better support their students.

The Experience of Neoliberal Education

The Experience of Neoliberal Education
Author: Bonnie Urciuoli
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2018-05-22
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1785338641

The college experience is increasingly positioned to demonstrate its value as a worthwhile return on investment. Specific, definable activities, such as research experience, first-year experience, and experiential learning, are marketed as delivering precise skill sets in the form of an individual educational package. Through ethnography-based analysis, the contributors to this volume explore how these commodified "experiences" have turned students into consumers and given them the illusion that they are in control of their investment. They further reveal how the pressure to plan every move with a constant eye on a demonstrable return has supplanted traditional approaches to classroom education and profoundly altered the student experience.

The Enterprise University

The Enterprise University
Author: Simon Marginson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2000-10
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780521794480

Throughout the industrialised world, universities have undergone remarkable changes since the mid-1980s. In Australia, interest has been intense, and publication of The Enterprise University was very timely. First published in 2001, it was the first systematic study of the Australian system since the momentous Dawkins reforms ten years earlier. The book is grounded in case studies of most of the major Australian universities: the authors interviewed a large number of senior managers. They also have taken account of global trends and have prepared the book in the light of international research on the university as an institution. The authors contend that the modern university can be understood as an 'enterprise university', characterised by corporate-style executive leadership. In a hard-hitting conclusion they propose novel policies and directions for Australia's higher education system.