College Made Whole

How can universities shape creative, adaptive, integrated learners ready to confront the world? This book's clear-eyed optimism is a challenge to everyone in higher education.

American higher education is being torn apart. Institutions, curricula, courses, and faculty roles are being "unbundled"—broken into constituent parts in the name of efficiency and cost savings. As a result, the college learning experience is fragmented and incoherent, leaving graduates less and less equipped to confront the dire social problems that cause those divisions in the first place.

In College Made Whole, Chris W. Gallagher lays bare the dangers of the dis-integration of the college experience and shows how we can put higher education back together again. The successful colleges and universities of the future, Gallagher argues, will be integrated: coherently and cohesively designed to help students achieve a lifelong learning experience that is more than the sum of its parts.

Pushing back against pernicious dichotomies that frame much discussion of US higher education, Gallagher critiques many of the hottest educational trends, including the overhyping of technological "solutions," rampant adjunctification, the promotion of nondegree credentials as a suitable replacement for college degrees, and the increasingly narrow focus on the vocational aims of a college education. Ivestigating the purposes of higher education historically and today, he suggests audacious proposals to enhance learning, including reorganizing institutions, reordering institutional priorities, redesigning curricula and courses, and rethinking edtech and learning technologies.

Lucidly written and packed with practical recommendations and real student stories, College Made Whole will challenge higher education professionals and policy makers, as well as anyone with a stake in the future of US higher education—which is to say, all of us who inhabit this fragile planet.