Book review of "Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed"

In some respects -in fact, most --Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed says little of relevance to higher education in Canada.But in those few respects that do have a bearing on the Canadian experience, the book can be a thought-provoking read.First, it is important to understand that the book's title is an over-statement.It is not about higher education at large.It is about higher education in the United States and, more particularly, about a single sector: religious colleges.Religious colleges constitute a large sector of higher education in the United Status, even larger when measured in terms of undergraduate education.By that definition there are only few Canadian counterparts for example, Redeemer, Tyndale, and Trinity-Western, all sectarian institutions offering secular degrees.Professor Brown's explanation of this focus is that a broader focus would have been methodologically unmanageable.There is practical truth to that: the book's research relies entirely on 150 confidential in-person interviews at eight colleges, each identified by a pseudonym.These are in turn organized into four "strategies" that were adopted from previous studies of for-profit colleges, an interesting methodological choice that deserves explanation.