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A hard-hitting examination of the currentcrisis in higher education and an urgent call for major reform.. With spending for it topping USD175 billion a year, American higher education is poised to upstage healthcare and welfare as the national issue. Zachary Karabell offers a surprising look at what students get for their money in this exhaustively researched yet accessible book.The crucial clash on campuses, Karabell claims, is not between traditionalists and multiculturalists, but between faculty and students. The problem: most students are working-class people seeking education to get a better job, while most faculty members are products of graduate schools that insulated them from the needs of real-world people. The solution: democratization of higher education. Sure to spark intense debate, Whats College For? should do for the 1990s what Illiberal Education did for the 1980s. }President Clinton declares that a two-year education should be the right of all Americans. Congress passes a USD40 billion package of tax breaks and scholarships aimed at making a degree accessible to everyone. Almost twothirds of high school graduates now go on to some form of higher education, and yet at the same time, those colleges and universities, inundated with a new kind of student, have been slow to respond to this revolutionary change.Zachary Karabell spent over a year traveling the country interviewing students, graduate students, faculty, and adjunct teachers, and the result is a portrait of American higher education that is neither conservative nor liberal and that needs to be taken seriously. There is a quiet revolution occurring that willthat ischanging the nature of education in this country.Higher education is becoming mass education, writes Karabell. The crucial clash on todays campuses is not between traditionalists, multiculturalists, and tenured radicals, but between the competing needs and desires of students, professors, administrators, and the larger society. The overwhelming majority of todays students are working-class people seeking education to get a job; they are not seeking a liberal education, nor planning to go on to graduate school. Most faculty members, products of the elite graduate schools that have insulated them from the needs of real-world people, are often profoundly ill-equipped to handle this changing student body. By exploring the myriad perspectives of these conflicting expectations Karabell concludes that a radical democratization of higher education is not only inevitable, it is desirable, and it will require dramatic changes in the structure and presumptions about education beyond the high school level.Topping USD175 billion a year, spending for American higher education will join health care and welfare as one of the top national issues, yet there is precious little real or broad-based understanding of the issues and social forces at work. Eschewing any political agenda, yet unafraid to ask as many questions as he answers, Zachary Karabell has provided the first reasoned examination of what has become a national concern. Sure to spark intense debate, Whats College For? is a clarion call for reform. }