Higher Education: An Overview

Over the past 100 years higher education has gone from a rarity to an expectation in American life. But with the abundance of schools, what is really being taught today? In this guide, we assemble a snapshot portrait of higher education in contemporary America for the non-expert reader, and link to further resources on the web discussing the role of education in society.

Where Do Students Study?

A wide variety of types of school are represented in higher education in America. Schools can be public or private, religiously affiliated or completely secular, and not-for-profit or for-profit. Some of the most familiar are large research universities with upwards of 10,000 students and extensive graduate programs. Many of these are publicly run, but others are private. Smaller universities with significant graduate programs can also be found, most of which are privately run. When the term “college” is used to describe a stand-alone institution, it most commonly refers to an exclusively undergraduate institution. Those with a focus on liberal arts– often exclusively liberal arts, and often paired with an experimental curriculum or unorthodox approach to learning– are liberal arts colleges. Some are public, but most are private, with most of those (about 130 colleges) participating in the alliance known as the “Annapolis Group.” The term “comprehensive colleges” is used to describe small colleges that incorporate extensive non-liberal arts programs, such as nursing or business. A handful of four-year institutions and graduate-only institutions specialize in one specific discipline, such as engineering or optometry. For those seeking an associate’s degree rather than a bachelor’s degree, two-year colleges provide an option, with the degree most often focused on a specific vocational practice. Most two-year colleges are publicly run, have an open admissions policy, and are known as community colleges. As of 2006, 27% of the population holds a bachelor’s degree, while 7% of the population holds an associate’s degree.

Some schools are considered to be more selective in their admissions, while many have an open-door admissions policy. In the public mind, selectivity is often equated with quality, but this is questionable. To help students find a good school, college rankings have been developed, with the U.S. News and World Report publishing an especially well-known ranking system. The ranking system has been strongly criticized by educational leaders and especially by representatives of liberal arts colleges. Rather than providing an accurate metric, they argue, rankings reduce the subtle, holistic, subjective college experience to a number that is supposedly applicable to all students. However, rankings officials respond that the rankings they provide are one of many possible tools for college searches; rather, they claim, they merely want to make numerical data about colleges and universities available and interpret it for the benefit of scholars.

What Do They Study?

In 2007-08, 1.6 million bachelor’s degrees were conferred in the United States (a 32% increase from 10 years previous). The most popular fields (a term that encompasses a range of majors) were business (335,000 degrees conferred), social sciences (167,000), health sciences (111,000), and education (103,000). The Princeton Review, a company tracking college admissions, identified the 10 most popular majors for undergraduates as (in descending order) business administration, psychology, nursing, biology and biological sciences, education, English, economics, communications, political science, and computer science. The business fields showed an especially dramatic increase in number of majors, with the number of conferred degrees increasing by about 50% between the 1997-98 and 2007-08 school years. At the same time, about 750,000 associate’s degrees were conferred, with the majority of those being in vocational fields– only about 30% were in a liberal arts field.

Further Reading

To assist the researcher, here are additional links for source data and statistics, as well as organizations representing higher education in the United States and advocating for quality education, periodicals, college rankings, and a couple of articles arguing against perceived deficiencies in the American education system.

• The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) provides a host of statistical data on post-secondary education in America.
• And the NCES publication The Condition of Education 2011 incorporates both qualitative and quantitative information on higher education.
• NCES also provides College Navigator, a tool to help compare colleges across a wide variety of metrics.
• The Chronicle of Higher Education is a leading periodical covering issues in higher education today.
• Inside Higher Ed is an online periodical covering many of the same issues, including a blog and podcast.
• The Carnegie Classification is a common tool used to classify different types of colleges and universities in the U.S.
• The U.S. News & World Report college rankings.
• Expanding to the global level, the Academic Ranking of World Universities mainly focuses on research universities, especially those that specialize in science and engineering.
• Inside Higher Ed covers the controversy over college rankings.
• For prospective students, the U.S. Department of Education’s College.gov is a great introductory portal.
• The official website of the Annapolis Group, with a thorough description of its mission and the mission of liberal arts colleges in general.
• Trends and statistics on community colleges, provided by the American Association of Community Colleges.
• U.S. Census data on school enrollment circa 2009.
• Census data on levels of educational attainment among Americans in 2010.
• The U.S. News‘ graduate school rankings.
• David Glenn, writing for the New York Times, suggests that perhaps America is graduating too many business students today.
• More students than ever before are attending college, but is there attendance of any value? This article argues that a shocking number of students might not be learning much.
• AOL’s Daily Finance discusses some of the potential problems of an increasing number of B.A.-holders.

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