Reviews for Research and Statistics Made Meaningful in Counseling and Student Affairs (with InfoTrac )

The average rating for Research and Statistics Made Meaningful in Counseling and Student Affairs (with InfoTrac ) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-09-26 00:00:00 Clarence Rhodes This book by George Keller serves primarily as a somewhat outdated call to arms for the American Higher Education system, opening with the traditional if somewhat clichéd mandatory introductory line for such manifestos: 'A specter is haunting higher education'. Keller claims that at the time of writing higher education was reaching a crisis of a never-before-seen scale. He claims that enrollments and funding were both reaching all-time lows, and that higher education was fast becoming irrelevant. He notes on the opening page that experts claimed that between 10 and 30 percent of Americas 3100 Higher Education institutions would have shut their doors or merged by 1995. With hindsight, we can see that the number of institutions has actually risen by almost 35% since the book was published, suggesting either that the threat about which Keller speaks is overstated, or that his call to arms was unprecedentedly successful. I suspect it may be the former. The book is dripping with neoliberal newspeak and the kind of 1980s management jargon that brings forth images of two-tone shirts and Trump Jr.-esque slicked back hair. The author seeks ultimately to replace the warm heart of academia with the cold mechanisms of a corporate machine, taking power away from faculty and placing it in the hands of bureaucrats and committees whose only goals are efficiency and profit. As much as strategic management has become integral to higher education, Keller's more extreme calls to arms have seemingly fallen on deaf ears for now. We still operate in a loosely-coupled system of shared leadership and autonomy, in which academic freedom can survive and individuals still retain a morsel of self-determination. Thinking of the academy as a corporate machine is a dangerous path to take, and threatens the very core of what academics do.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-10-08 00:00:00 Ace Kuenzli One of the more comical works of higher education scholarship from the 1970s and 1980s...George Keller was a respected scholar in his day, but not much longer afterward. He made significant contributions to faculty's sense of ruling class solidarity -- in opposition to both American democracy and students' academic freedom. But, his wildly inaccurate statistical projections about college enrollments in the 1980s clipped his wings soon after publishing the (above titled) monstrosity of higher education scholarship. He was washed up by the early 1990s after college enrollments far exceeded his pessimistic predictions. The only intellectual merit of his work(s) - that I read as research for my book, _Honors of Inequality_, stems from his tragic appeal to academics of the world to unite. His depraved appeal to faculty self-interest, however, resonated with only a small swath of disillusioned professors and academics at the end of the twentieth century.