Richard K. Vedder - Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America

In his book Restoring the Promise, Richard Vedder continues in his role as the conscience of modern higher education. Readers will have to determine their own answers, but Dr. Vedder is asking all the right questions.

Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., President, Purdue University; former Governor, State of Indiana

If you truly want to understand the current crises in American higher education, start with Restoring the Promise, a masterful and eye-opening work of analysis and diagnosis.

Alan Charles Kors, Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History, University of Pennsylvania; Co-Founder and former Chairman, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education; and co-author (with Harvey A. Silvergate), The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on Americas Campuses

Richard Vedder is a major national resource on higher education. No one knows it better-especially what is wrong with it, why and how it got to be wrong, and how and where we might make it right, or at least better. In Restoring the Promise, Vedder chronicles higher educations waste, duplication, overpricing, and broken promises. So much wrong and so many misrepresentations for so much money!! If we want to fix it, his chronicle is a good place to start. Thorough, scholarly, probative and revealing.

William J. Bennett, former Secretary, U.S. Department of Education; former Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities; author (with David Wilezol), Is College Worth It? A Former United States Secretary of Education and a Liberal Arts Graduate Expose the Broken Promise of Higher Education; editor, The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories

American higher education appears to have lost its way. A short list of problems includes: escalating and unaccountable costs; documented decline of the quality and extent of learning; growing misfit between the educational experience and life prospects; obsession with administrative and political agendas that far too often compromise the pursuit of truth and intellectual freedom that are higher educations raison d etre. As a critical friend of higher education, Richard Vedder deploys in his superb book Restoring the Promise the considerable analytical skills that have made him one of Americas leading scholars of higher education to not only illuminate the origins and nature of the problems that beset us, but to also provide us with highly informed and instructive remedies to right the ship.

Donald A. Downs, Alexander Meiklejohn Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Law and Journalism; the Glenn B. and Cleone Orr Hawkins Emeritus Professor of Political Science; and Co-Founder of the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy; University of Wisconsin, Madison

Richard Vedders book, Restoring the Promise provides a tough-minded blueprint for resolving American higher educations crisis of confidence. He skillfully draws from historical and economic analyses as the base of reason to achieve the revelation that our colleges and universities can regain their proper footing and missions. This well-written, thoroughly researched work cuts through the public relations images and ideologies that have stalled higher education of the 21st century at a time when they most need to confront a host of internal and external problems that will no longer be fixed by business as usual. Vedder combines good writing with critical thinking in dissecting the dilemmas of prices and costs along with access and affordability that have been turning the American Dream of higher education into an educational and financial nightmare. Vedders book helps leaders in American higher education turn away from complacence and indecision toward informed reflection and discussions about institutional practices and public policies in rebuilding a base that in turn will be essential to restoring the promise of going to college.

John R. Thelin, University Research Professor, History of Higher Education and Public Policy, College of Education, University of Kentucky; author, A History of American Higher Education and Going to College in the Sixties

With Restoring the Promise, Richard Vedder has written a thorough and thoughtful book on higher education in nearly all of its aspects. It is a marvelous endeavor and a rich resource for wonks as well as bystanders. One is not obliged to agree on philosophy or politics to appreciate this important contribution.

A. Lee Fritschler, former Vice President and Director, Center for Public Policy Education, Brookings Institution; former Assistant Secretary for Post-Secondary Education, U.S. Department of Education; former President, Dickinson College; Professor Emeritus, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University; former Chairman, U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission

Restoring the Promise is destined to become the must-read resource for anyone hoping to understand why college tuition is so obscenely expensive and why students emerge from college, if they graduate at all, with an almost unblemished ignorance about history and the achievements of the West. Richard Vedders calculations of college endowments per studentnearly $3 million at Princeton University, for exampleare alone worth the price of admission. University administrators will hate Restoring the Promise, since it demolishes the arguments that more federal student aid is the solution to ballooning tuition costs and that not enough teenagers are attending college. Everyone else should welcome it.

Heather L. Mac Donald, Thomas W. Smith Fellow, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research; author, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture

In Restoring the Promise, Richard Vedder brings experience from a venerable career as economist and historian to an analysis of the troubled state of higher education. His research is data driven, his writing is uncomplicated, and his arguments are persuasive enough to worry standard-issue academic administrators. Hurrah!

John W. Sommer, Knight Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina; former Dean, School of Social Science, University of Texas at Dallas; editor, The Academy in Crisis: The Political Economy of Higher Education

Richard Vedder has seen our higher education problems coming miles away. From skyrocketing tuition and crushing student debt to the diminishing utility of a college education and the underemployment of graduates, Vedder has spent decades looking at the data and warning that this will not end well. If you want to understand how higher education came to this crisis and how it can be fixed, start with his book, Restoring the Promise.

Jason L. Riley, Member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and Naomi Schaefer Riley, Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

American higher education promises so muchexcellence, access, diversity, world-class researchand yet it delivers far too little for so many students. The problems are manyhigh cost, micromanaging from the federal government, diversity programs that do more harm than goodthe list goes on. The book,