I just came back from attending the ECAR Symposium 2007 entitled, “Higher Education IT: New Boundaries, or No Boundaries?” and thought I’d pass along two “findings,” as they say in the analyst biz: Software as a Service (SaaS) is hot within higher education, and despite all the technology possibilities these days, students still want to have face-to-face interactions with teachers.

Regarding SaaS. This is when a vendor creates an application and delivers it over the Web, rather than selling you software that you install yourself. Due to the popularity of my Google Apps report, I was invited to give a presentation on SaaS-based productivity applications (information worker applications such as creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, managing e-mail, collaboration, and content management). The public knows these applications by names such as Google Apps and Windows Live: a shorthand way to think of them is as Microsoft Office online. At the beginning of 2007 no major vendor sold them; 12 months later, Adobe, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and Yahoo! either offer them or are developing them.

(more…)

Although The New York Times article mentions Williams (along with Amherst, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, UVA, and UNC), it’s really about Anthony Jack, a graduating senior at Amherst.

Some interesting stats:

In their groundbreaking 1998 study of 28 selective universities, William Bowen, the former president of Princeton, and Derek Bok, now the interim president of Harvard, found that 86 percent of blacks who enrolled were middle or upper middle class. (Amherst was not included in that study.) The white students were even wealthier.

In Mr. Jack’s class of 413, 15 percent, or 61, students, are from families with incomes of less than $45,000 a year; about two-thirds of those are from families earning less than $30,000.

There was a Williams event in LA two months ago. It was called RoadScholars and featured, among others, Sam Crane.

I just finished watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean from the window of my hotel room in sunny and warm LA.

I am here to give a talk - actually I will give the same talk twice - on political change in China to a group, a fairly large group, of alumni from Williams College. There are several other faculty members here with me to give other talks. It will be quite a circus of academic performance! It all lasts one day, tomorrow, but should be pleasantly intense.

Here are some of the thoughts I will toss out tomorrow.

Kudos to Williams for holding such events and to Sam for blogging about them. But why is it so hard for the rest of us to find out any details? Where is the speaker list? The program? The slides? Why must Williams be so insular so much of the time?

Ah, well. The RoadScholars appears to be a program with some staying power. When will the College learn that transparency creates success?

According to a story in The Boston Globe, MIT’s entire curriculum will be online by the end of the year. It’s driving visitors to the site: MIT forecasts it will see 1.5 million visits in March, but it’s unclear whether that number applies to the entire MIT web site or just the curriculum section (called “OpenCourseWare”).

Courses that include video presentations tend to draw online crowds, and popular courses include Linear Algebra, Physics I, and Principles of Macroeconomics.

MIT students also use the site to take practice exams and to help them determine which courses to take next semester.

Even so, roughly 60 percent of visitors to the site come from outside of North America, and about half are what MIT calls “self-learners” — folks who are neither students nor educators but are presumably drawn to MIT only by the sheer joy of learning.

As folks say in the marketing biz, it no doubt helps increase MIT’s brand awareness.

For those wishing that they could watch Williams sporting events other than the Williams/Amherst game, technology is coming to the rescue. The Associated Press published a story today in which they describe how some colleges and universities are broadcasting games via the Web.

Big Sky Conference’s Northern Arizona offered webcasts of home football games last year. Using the four cameras already set up to provide replays on the stadium scoreboard, the school added audio from its radio broadcasts along with continually updated statistics.

“Our fans love it,” said Steven Shaff, a spokesman for the school’s athletic department. “We had people in Alaska, parents of students in Canada, watching our games last year.”

This season, the entire nine-school Big Sky Conference will webcast all football, basketball and volleyball games, using technology from Salt Lake City-based SportsCast Network LLC.

Fans will be able to choose which team’s audio feed to which to listen. Games will be archived and can be downloaded to portable devices like Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod.

According to The New York Times, some college presidents have taken to blogging.

Some command-and-control types are horrified — “Veterans of campus public relations disasters warn that presidents blog at their peril; ‘an insane thing to do’ is how Raymond Cotton, a lawyer who advises universities and their presidents in contract negotiations, describes it.” — while others think it’s a great idea: “Bob Johnson, a consultant to many universities on marketing, said he was mystified that university officials had not generally embraced blogs. Mr. Johnson said student blogs, for example, could be a ‘hugely effective’ recruitment tool, even if they carried the implicit promise — or threat — of uncensored truth, however unflattering.”

Which brings us to Williams. While President Morty Schapiro would be a terrific blogger, I hope Williams doesn’t do the imperial blog thing — assuming, of course, that Williams ever has an official blog.

(more…)

After saying in October that using anti-plagiarism software would undermine the trust between the university and its students, Harvard University is now licensing that software from iParadigms LLC.

The Bloomberg story cites a sobering statistic:

Of 56,611 undergraduates surveyed in a 2005 study by Duke University’s Center for Academic Integrity, 37 percent admitted copying Internet material without attribution, compared with 10 percent in 1999.

Atlantic Media, the parent company of The Atlantic Monthly, has started a new magazine named “02138.” It’s a glossy magazine about all things Harvard. The New York Times article about its debut issue calls it “a luxury lifestyle book,” similar to Hamptons Magazine, Palm Beach Illustrated, and Rich Guy. The New York Post takes the first issue of 02138 to task for its article on the 100 most influential Harvard alumni, saying “a lot of it is just media-centric puffery.”

So, of course, the question arises, when are we going to see 01267? As Ephblog makes clear, Williams alumni can wax on forever about Williams-related goings on and alumni. Of course, since Williams churns out only 500 graduates a year — compared to Harvard’s thousands when you add in all the graduate schools — maybe media companies figure a 01267 magazine wouldn’t capture “a large enough demographic,” as they say in the biz.

Perhaps Ephblog should rename itself to 01267, billing itself as an online luxury lifestyle magazine and garnering funding from VCs and articles in The New York Times. Or maybe we just sit on the sidelines and see if 06511 is next.

An article in today’s Boston Globe says Harvard will announce that it is ending early admissions next year. The pitch is that Yale, Tufts, and other universities wanted to do it, but only Harvard had the guts:

“Somebody has got to take the lead,” interim president Derek Bok said. “We are certainly in a strong position to take whatever risks are involved.”

It will be interesting to watch the ripple effect.

An article in today’s The Boston Globe entitled, “Ex-dean says Harvard run like day care,” starts off by saying, “Harvard University leaders are running the school like ‘a day care center for college students,’ trying to dazzle undergraduates with concerts and a new pub, rather than teaching them to be responsible citizens.” The article summarizes the views of Harry Lewis, the former Dean of Harvard College, that he states in his new book, Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.

The article goes on to say,

…the book is the result of his attempt to make sense of the forces pushing his beloved university into a “consumerist” mode.

He said that other elite universities suffer many of the same problems.

Parents paying the full cost of Harvard, or $41,675 this year, “expect the university to treat them like customers, not like acolytes in some temple they are privileged to enter,” Lewis writes.

They routinely call professors to complain about their children’s grades, he writes, and they believe that the university should erase any evidence of bad academic performance or personal misconduct, excusing those failings as symptoms of psychiatric problems or disabilities.

Harvard, meanwhile, participates in the coddling, Lewis said. Administrators, he argues, get carried away with their concern about Harvard’s low scores on a student satisfaction survey, compared with peer institutions.

That American colleges are taking a consumerist bent is not a new concept. Professor Fred Rudolph ‘42, an expert on the history of American colleges and universities, made that point in a lecture he gave at Williams in 1993. (A transcript of the lecture is in the appendix of the current paperback version of his book, Mark Hopkins and the Log: Williams College, 1836-1872.)

So the question arises, has Williams been equally obsequious to students, or has it done a better job of combining education and consumerism than Harvard?

No, not the entering class size at Williams, but rather the enrollment in the most popular class at Harvard: “Positive Psychology.” As The Boston Globe puts it, it teaches a

new area of psychology that focuses on what makes people feel good rather than the pathologies that can make them feel miserable.

Next in popularity are an economics class (669 students) and a second psychology course (550 students) taught by the same teacher of the first course, a Mr. Ben-Shahar. As the Globe notes, with two courses he’s teaching more than 1,400 students. In Williams terms, that would translate into teaching two-thirds of the student body within one semester.

Damn, why didn’t I go to Harvard? That way, I could fondly remember almost getting run over in Harvard Square, and taking a course with 854 other bodies. As it is, I’m stuck with memories of kicking through the golden leaves in Williamstown and taking a course from a Pulitzer award-winning author with 17 laughing, argumentative friends. Oh, well. Live and learn.

The National Association of College and University Business Officers released data on college and university endowments. Not surprisingly, Harvard still has the largest endowment with $25 billion, followed by Yale ($15 billion), and Stanford ($12 billion). Williams weighs in at #37 with $1.3 billion, To put that number in a little perspective, it is larger than the University of Toronto and, more importanty, Amherst. Alternatively, “if you added up the endowments of the 10 historically black colleges with the largest funds, they would not equal the endowment of Williams College.” Not bad for a school with only 2000 students.

What surprised me is that Grinnell has passed Williams in liberal arts endowment. I guess this was true in 2003 as well, but I somehow missed it. I can’t any stories about Grinnell receiving a very large gift, so how did it surpass Williams? It is a smaller college in a less wealthy part of the country, so the shift is surprising. The only suggestion I can find is that Grinnell spends less of its endowment than Williams:

Grinnell College in Iowa had the distinction of being the wealthiest liberal-arts college, with an endowment of $1.3 billion in 2004. But Grinnell spent only 4% of its endowment that year. In fiscal 2005, the figure fell to 3.5%.

Mickey Munley, vice president of college and alumni relations, says the school has a policy of spending 4.5% of the average size of the endowment for the last three years. He says the school relies on its endowment for half its spending and needs to be conservative about its withdrawals. In fact, Mr. Munley says, the school has plans to bring down the rate to 4% by 2007. At the same time, the school expects to raise its tuition and fees — now just under $35,000 — so they are more in line with rivals. “We are trying to be responsible for future generations of students,” he says.

This might imply that Grinnell is not on the building spree that our alma mater is at the moment. So the Williams administration builds facilities to “benefit future generations of students” and Grinnell saves its money. I suppose the correct strategy depends upon whether you think the new buildings will be a net positive. Given the quality of the new science facilities, art building, and Goodrich Hall, I like the adminstration’s strategy.

Given the frequent allusions to David Horowitz’s ad in the Williams Record and complaints of ideological narrowness among the Williams faculty, the two of you not burnt out on the topic might be interested in the hearings on the “Academic Bill of Rights” taking place at Temple. David Horowitz offered lengthy testimony, but made some interesting admissions in interviews after the hearings.

That is all. My apologies to David R.

Ben Stein had a piece in The New York Times on November 7th discussing why alumni should give to colleges and universities with large endowments. Well, that’s not quite true — he was talking about a specific case, Yale, where he went to law school.

His November 7th essay was actually a follow-up to a column that he wrote several weeks earlier. As he paraphrased on November 7th, he posited on October 23rd,

Yale has such a wildly successful endowment and makes so very much money from it that the sums dwarf what it is possible for us as alumni to give, unless we are fantastically rich. Our contributions to Yale are trivial compared with its investment return, while the same donations could be so much more meaningful to smaller. nonprofit groups- like ones that help veterans or lost dogs and cats. I also pointed out how much the Yale endowment director, David F. Swensen, is paid, and wondered if that was right.

Well, he apparently got a ton of e-mails, letters, and calls about that stance, and the November 7th column was a bit of a back-pedal job. However, his revised view is one I find interesting — and certainly one that I subscribe to: Yale deserves his support not so much for logical reasons, but for the humanity of the place. He says, “I’ll keep giving to Yale, and with a full heart, for the memory of Henry Varnum Poor and the many other kind souls of New Haven. Not everything is about reason.”

He explained,

[My giving] has to do with a man named Henry Varnum Poor, the scion of an old New England family. He was either associate dean or assistant dean of the law school when I was there, covering subjects like financial aid and admissions. He was a dapper, bald-headed fellow with steel-rimmed glasses that evoked New England rectitude, and he wore supercool J. Press checked sport jackets. He sent me the treasured letter of admission in the spring of 1966 that told me I had been accepted.

(more…)

The New York Times ran an article on October 31st, profiling a study by The Chronicle of Higher Education that stated that college presidents are more inclined to worry about fiscal matters rather than educational matters.

Some excerpts:

The presidents said they believed they were judged slightly more on whether they had a balanced budget than for the quality of educational programs. Five of the six top concerns they cited related to money: rising health care costs, rising tuition, financial aid, technology costs and inadequate faculty salaries. The sixth was retaining students.

Discussing daily activities, more than half of the presidents, 53 percent, said they spent part of every day on fund-raising. The next most frequently mentioned daily activity was budget and finance matters (44 percent). Only 41 percent said they dealt with educational leadership on a daily basis. Even fewer presidents, 28 percent, - said they attended to student life matters every day.

Despite the emphasis on financial matters, nearly a fifth of the presidents said the facet of their jobs they were least prepared for was fund-raising. Eleven percent said the part they were most unprepared for was dealing with legislators and other political issues. And 11 percent pointed to budgetary issues as their Achilles’ heel when they became presidents.

There has been quite a lot of talk in the Blogosphere of late about the overall gender disparity in higher education, with approximately 135 women in college for every 100 men overall. Despite the claims of the anti-Summers crowd, men still have an overwhelming majority in the G-heavy fields comprising computer science, math, all sorts of engineering, and the math-heavy sciences of Chemistry and Physics.

It might surprise some of you to discover that I am finding it quite difficult to get as worked up about this percentile disparity as I do about other areas in which men are discriminated against. For instance, I am a staunch opponent of the perverse Clintonian reinterpretation of Title IX that requires sports participation mirroring the gender ratio of the school to avoid gender discrimination claims. I find the argument “women on average earn less than men, therefore there’s systematic widespread discrimination in the workforce” to be both socially ignorant and logically flawed at best (if there is sufficient demand, I’d be happy to provide my reasoning in another post). I also am adamantly opposed to what Christina Hoff Summers called “The War Against Boys” — the very real discrimination against males in pre-college education. While this discrimination may discourage men from going to college in the first place, there is no way that it can explain the entire sex disparity in higher education. In fact, I would be quite surprised if this early discrimination were more than 25% of the cause of the disparity.

When presented with a numerical or percentage disparity, I generally have two sets of thoughts:
(1) Conditional probability and Bayes’ Theorem — Mere disparities don’t tell us anything. What is the relevant group and what is the relevant population? Figure out if there is still a disparity after comparing.
(2) People respond to incentives — What are the incentives elsewhere that might fully explain or sharply mitigate the perceived disparity?

(more…)

A September 20th article in The New York Times entitled, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” notes that:

At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.

There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.

Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.

Having watched their mothers struggle to balance home and career, as a History professor at Yale puts it, “The women today are, in effect, turning realistic.”

An interesting side effect of this is that, for such elite colleges, including Williams, Alumni Fund and capital gifts may lessen. With fewer investment bankers, dot.com executives, lawyers, and physicians in the alumni mix, the number of $2,000, $10,000, and $1 million gifts will probably decrease. Williams has an interesting gift profile — it’s a rhomboid or cut off pyramid shape. We have very few alums who give $10s of millions of dollars (unlike Harvard, for example), but have a healthy group who give $50,000 here and $2,000,000 there. If that section of givers starts to shrink, the bottom of the pyramid — those who give $25 and $250 — will no doubt be asked to give more.

This year’s goal for the Alumni Fund is $9.6 million — a pretty hefty sum for a school with 23,000 alumni. So if you’re in the below $1,000 group, don’t be surprised if you’re asked to give a bit more in the coming years….

For readers interested in blogs and Web site design, I just published a short report comparing how the top 30 colleges/universities (per U.S. News) responded to Katrina on their Web sites.

This is not about the offline behavior — for example, which college is taking in the most students — but rather how they altered their Web sites to disseminate information about student aid, fundraising, alumni status, etc.

Dartmouth, Duke, and MIT did the best job at making it easy for their various constituents (students, alumni, staff) to share information, via well-designed mini-sites as well as blogs and message boards. At the other end of the spectrum, Grinnell and Harvey Mudd have made no reference to Katrina on their Web sites whatsoever — something I find hard to believe, given the national angst and the fact that they must have had some students and alumni impacted by the destruction.

Another oddity is CalTech. Over Labor Day weekend, it had a notice up about Katrina. But rather than pointing to fundraising efforts or notifying people of classmate/alumni whereabouts, it just noted that mail delivery in the Gulf area would be delayed.

Although not mentioned specifically in the report, Williams sits on the border between Best and Standard Practices.

The New York Times ran an article today entitled, “In Recruiting, a Big Push From Small Colleges, Too.” It describes how small colleges recruit athletes, using Haverford as an example.

Amy Bergin, Haverford’s volleyball coach, makes some interesting observations:

“Of 1,000 I’ve contacted, about half will reply,” Bergin said. “About half that reply will be academically qualified. About half of them will be truly interested in Haverford. About half of them will be actually good enough to play volleyball for us. About half of that group will apply for admission. About half of them will get accepted. And about half of them will decide to come here. If that happens, that’s a really good year. That’s almost eight girls.”

“There are the girls who say, ‘Well, I’m a Division I talent,’ ” Bergin said. “And I think, ‘Forget it.’ I don’t need the attitude. I’ve got to spend four years with these girls. I cross girls off my list all the time because I think they’ll be high maintenance.”

Mike Murphy, the men’s lacrosse coach, offers some thoughts on working with Admissions:

The high school goalie Murphy is welcoming to the Haverford campus is Kevin Friedenberg of Needham, Mass. Murphy has scouted Friedenberg twice. Seconds after shaking Murphy’s hand at the student center, Friedenberg hands over his transcript, which Murphy scans in seconds and offers immediate advice.

He wants Friedenberg to take as many Advanced Placement courses as he can in his senior year. “You’re a good student, but that’s the first thing that admissions will ask about,” Murphy said.

“When recruiting at this level, if you don’t take your cues from the people at admissions and use it to guide the prospects on their academic record, you’re just crazy,” Murphy said. “That’s probably as important as identifying athletic talent.”

He sums up by noting:

“You start this process knowing of hundreds of kids you think you might want to play for you,” he said. “But you know that only a few will actually be on the field at your first practice. And none of them will be on scholarship and all of them can walk away at any time. They can just quit. So you better have made your choices carefully, and they better have come for the right reasons.”

While I’m sure Williams’ practices differ in some way from Haverford’s, they’re certainly a lot closer to Haverford’s than, say, Ohio State.

On a side note, for folks interested in better understanding Williams’ admissions processes (admittedly by proxy), I highly recommend The Gatekeepers, by Jacques Steinberg. It follows the admissions process at Wesleyan over the course of a year (1999).

An Associated Press story on Sunday talks about “helicopter parents” — parents of college students who “hover” over their children. For example, calling to complain to college administrators when their sons or daughters get bad grades, or

Recently, one parent demanded to know what Colgate planned to do about the sub-par plumbing her daughter encountered on a study-abroad trip to China.

According to the article, consumer-oriented parents expect a superb experience for their kiddies at $40,000 a year, and aren’t bashful about pointing that out to college administrators.

To foster student self-reliance, colleges have turned to skits, lectures, and reading lists to explain to parents that a certain amount of student flailing (without the crutch of parent intervention) is expected and good.

Geez, Williams is missing the boat. According to an article in today’s New York Times, colleges are renaming (oops, the buzzword is “rebranding”) themselves to court students. Beaver College became Arcadia University; Trenton State College became the College of New Jersey; Western Maryland College became McDaniel College; California State University, Hayward, became California State University, East Bay. The article says that, due to the rebranding, applications and student qualifications are up. In Arcadia University’s case, applications have doubled in just four years.

At this point, Williams has an acceptance rate of 18.8%; we could probably drive that down to 15% or even 12% if the college adopted a catchy new name. I mean, “Williams College” — how mundane can you get?

My suggestion is “Purple Vista College.” “Purple” bows to the college’s history, while also leveraging the mechanism of color references used by popular sports teams (e.g., the Boston Red Sox). “Vista” shows that the college is up-to-date, with a nod to Microsoft’s forthcoming operating system (code-named Longhorn, now called Vista) as well as referring to Williams’ Climb Far capital campaign. (Get it? — you Climb Far to reach a Vista.)

In fact, to enable frequent rebranding, the college could adopt a “Purple [blank]” format, with Purple remaining the same and [blank] changing according to the times. For example, when I attended Williams in the early 70s, it could have been called “Purple Haze.” Marijuana was easy to get, and if you were really cheap you could get high without buying any pot whatsoever. All you had to do was visit a certain smoke-laden fourth floor suite in Pratt, and after shooting the breeze for 20 minutes you’d be high for half a day.

So what are your suggestions? If not Purple Vista College, what other new name works? Although Williams takes great pride in being a leader in higher education, it’s clear that we’ll be playing catch up in this case. Only with the help of Ephblog readers can we avert this crisis of the mundane name.

Williams is cited in a sports columnist’s article — “Nicknames get crazy in college athletics” — as having an odd mascot name. Go figure.

The article points to the site College Nicknames, created by a Ph.D. candidate at UNH. For my money, Ephs doesn’t seem as bad as Banana Slugs or Boll Weevils.

Of course, the reason we ended up with purple as the school color is that the sister of a sports player in the 1800s went down to Spring Street to buy lots of cloth for rah-rah banners and streamers. Purple was the only color that the dry goods store had enough of, since it was the most unpopular color….

There is an article in The New York Times today that talks about a popular dining hall program at Berkeley College at Yale that serves organic and seasonal food. “A Dining Hall Where Students Sneak In” states, “The dining hall is the outgrowth of Yale’s Sustainable Food Project, which was started to support area farmers and promote healthier eating by serving mostly locally produced, seasonal crops and organic ingredients.” Examples include, “fair-trade coffee - hoping to provide higher wages to the laborers who pick the beans - hormone-free and antibiotic-free milk from cows that are allowed to graze, and fresh-cut potato chips from organic potatoes grown in Connecticut.” At the same time, the program isn’t totally doctrinaire — it still offers All-American staples such as Hershey’s chocolate syrup and sodas. As one of the students noted, “There’d be a rebellion if they ran out of blue Gatorade.”

It’s so popular that Yale students from other colleges try and eat there, with varying degrees of success (apparently at Yale you can only eat in the dining hall of the college you’re affiliated with). While administrators note the program is a hit, they also point out that its 50% more expensive for the university than the regular meal program. (It sounds as if Yale is currently subsidizing this experiment and not burdening students with the extra cost.)

Any thoughts on this for Williams? Could Williams students be similarly enticed, and if the program were adopted college-wide, would parents be willing to pay the increased room and board fee?

In “Williamstown Store Has Antidote to Student Stress,” The Berkshire Eagle discusses a new care package service for Williams students jointly run by Where’D You Get That!?, a store at the bottom of Spring Street (used to be in Joe Dewey’s old bookstore near the gym) and All Campus Entertainment (ACE). Parents can order care packages from www.studentx-press.com, which lists options such as, The Paper Chase ($49.95), Fresh & Fruity ($29.95), and Sinful Munchies ($34.95). When I was in college my mother used to send me sugar cookies that she’d made. Apparently the commercial touch is more desirable now.

As a counter-balance to the Williams-centricity of Ephblog, take a look at “Survival of the Fittest: The Undergraduate Experience” in The New York Times. Author John Merrow follows five undergraduates at the University of Arizona, of which only one is actively engaged in her education; as the reporter notes, “learning seems to be optional.” Two of the story sub-headings: “If This Is Boozeday, This Must Be College” and “When No One Knows Your Name.”

Some of the sobering stats cited: at the University of Arizona, 23% of freshmen drop out; at the University of Kentucky, 22%. After 6 years, 55% of the freshmen at the University of Arizona will have graduated. The student/teacher ratio at Arizona is 19.4 to 1, 18 to 1 at Penn State, and 22 to 1 at Texas A&M. The University of Arizona basketball team’s overall graduation rate is 25 percent.

I’m glad I didn’t pay thousands of dollars to be ignored.

Andrew Delbanco has written an interesting article in the New York Review of Books entitled, Colleges: An Endangered Species? In the course of referring to a variety of books — Stover at Yale, by Owen Johnson; The Future of the Public University in America: Beyond the Crossroads, by James J. Duderstadt and Farris W. Womack; The Uses of the University, by Clark Kerr; and Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, by David L. Kirp — he gives a succinct history of higher education in America.

At one point he notes,

The leading liberal arts colleges will doubtless survive, but they belong to an endangered species. Michael S. McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation and former president of Macalester College, and Morton O. Schapiro, president of Williams, report that even now “the nation’s liberal arts college students would almost certainly fit easily inside a Big Ten football stadium: fewer than 100,000 students out of more than 14 million.”[10] In today’s educational landscape, barely one sixth of all college students fit the traditional profile of full-time residential students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. One third of American undergraduates now work full-time, and more than half attend college part-time, typically majoring in subjects with immediate utility, such as accounting or computing.

Which makes Williams a very rare experience indeed.