Abstract
Focusing on the academic profession, The Global Future of Higher Education and the Academic Profession provides descriptions of Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRICs) and the United States’ education systems as well as their respective challenges. In the introductory chapter, Philip Altbach describes the expansion of college enrollment, the lack of funding, privatization of higher education, and corruption as the main salient issues of the BRIC education systems. In Chapter Two, Simon Schwartzman characterizes the “different institutional cultures” (p. 35) in Brazil’s higher education. Upon hire, academics at public universities are granted tenure, a highly competitive salary, and a variety of benefits (including early retirement and paid annual vacations). In contrast, professors at private institutions work part-time on poorly-paid hourly contracts, have few or no promotions, and can be fired without justification. Schwartzman describes that in spite of public and private funding available for public universities, these institutions have a high proportion of scholars who have never published in peer-reviewed journals and/or in foreign journals.
In Chapter Three, Gregory Androushchak, Yaroslav Kuzminov, and Maria Yudkevich identify lack of funds, the low salaries paid to professors, the “mass exodus of talented individuals” (p. 66), and the lack of prestige of the professoriate profession as the main concerns of Russia’s higher education system. The authors emphasize that extremely low salaries promote a culture of corruption in which students pay to obtain good grades, and it creates a “pseudo-education” system (p. 81). According to N. Jayaram, “regionalism and parochialism impinge on India’s higher education” (p. 94). Jayaram reiterates two points, namely, that professors’ main role is to teach undergraduates and there is a blurry distinction between private and the public institutions. While professors obtain permanent appointments at public institutions in India, permanent positions are virtually non-existent at private universities. Finally, Jayaram describes that it is not uncommon to hear charges on nepotism and corruption in the hiring process at publicly-funded institutions.
With the world’s largest college enrollment, Ma Wanhua and Wen Jianbo relate that keeping pace with the growing university enrollment is China’s most important challenge. Additionally, the authors point out that men and younger candidates are still favored in hiring practices. With the goal of having a few world class universities, Wanhua and Jianbo discuss how the government of China is investing resources in “The Changjiang Scholar Plan,” a program dedicated to recruiting world-known professors to teach and conduct research (p. 155). Finally, Martin Finkelstein and Kevin Iglesias outline the main challenges for the U.S. education system. The authors mention widening differences between private and public institutions, which the authors link to a decline in state government funding. While the gender gap in academia has been shrinking, the authors maintain that there are still wage gap disparities that need to be addressed. Furthermore, the authors discuss the diverging academic paths of newly minted PhD holders with a degree in the hard sciences or quantitative science compared to those in the humanities. These authors also discuss how academia is stratified, with some professors enjoying prestige and remuneration while others struggle for a permanent position. Scholars interested in higher education, education policy and sociology may want to read this book.