![]()
Chapter 1
Context
The days in which the phrase digital higher education is meaningfully distinguishable from simply higher education are numbered. . . . That said, we have a legacy of infrastructure, particularly for broad-access institutions, built before the digital model existed.
—Anya Kamenetz (2015)
Yet while waves of change will come our way, one thing is certain and sure. The future of the academic library will be dependent on the future of learning. As the premier supporting service to learning, the library must chart its future in alignment with the direction of learning.
—Susan C. Curzon (2010, personal communication)
U.S. higher education institutions and their libraries have changed in many ways since the first edition of this book appeared, yet in other ways they remain as they were, as the Kamenetz quotation suggests. “The worldwide respect accorded to American higher education should be a source of satisfaction to many people, not least to those who work in the academy. Ironically, however, this newfound prominence has brought many problems in its wake. No longer are colleges and universities left to function as they please” (Bok, 2013, p. 2). The change Bok refers to arises from the fact that many stakeholders in higher education are demanding more accountability and transparency in how institutions operate as costs have escalated. People question the value for money spent. There are more demands by the public for accountability and transparency. There is a tendency to look at job placement numbers as well as how long a graduate must seek employment when thinking about the usefulness of a degree. We look at these and other factors throughout this text.
U.S. postsecondary education is a vibrant mix of institutions that is rather unusual from a global perspective. There are public (UCLA is one such) and private institutions (Harvard is the leading and oldest example) as well as for-profit organizations (University of Phoenix is one of the largest); some are gender-based (such as Wesleyan College), some are culturally oriented (such as Diné College, a Navajo college), some are faith-based (Biola University is an example), while others are vocational in character (Lincoln Technological Institute). The mix also employs a variety of pedagogical approaches to teaching, curriculums, completion requirements, and other operational matters. Equally varied are the degrees, certificates, and “badges” (more about badges later in the chapter) offered to an individual completing these institutions’ programs.
Another distinctive trait of U.S. postsecondary education, compared to that of other countries, is the percentage of the population enrolled in the programs. The spring 2016 total enrollment was 18.3 million students, down slightly from 2015 (https://nscnews.org/241000-fewer-college-students-over-age-24-enrolled-under-age-24-enrollments-remain-steady/). That figure is about 5.5 percent of the total U.S. population at that time. The vast majority of students enroll in an institution that is, at least partially, funded by a state or local government (two- and four-year degree-granting bodies). Fewer than 7 percent enroll in a for-profit program. For current enrollment data, visit https://nscresearchcenter.org/.
Almost all institutions share at least one commonality—the need to provide students with resources to complete their assignments. More often than not that support is, in part, in the form of library services. Libraries have been a part of U.S. higher education since the first “college” was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1636. They have been, and remain, a significant component in the process of providing education and training of students, as we will demonstrate throughout this book.
Higher Education Variations
What constitutes U.S. academia? There is no short answer to this question. The mix of institutions is challenging when it comes to trying to generalize about U.S. higher education. The fact of the matter is that organizational researchers have been trying to bring a structure to the field for many years. Institutions are embedded in various political arrangements and governance structures of remarkable diversity. Some are multicampus operations, in some cases with each campus functioning more or less as an autonomous institution with its own curriculum and admission standards. Others operate as a single entity, even if geographically dispersed. Some are single-purpose institutions—law schools, for example—while others offer a wide range of subjects and degrees.
In light of the great diversity within U.S. postsecondary education, it is not surprising that academic libraries are equally diverse. A survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (Institute of Education Sciences [IES], 2016) identified 3,700 entities meeting the following definition:
An academic library is the library associated with a degree-granting institution of higher education. Academic libraries are identified by the post-secondary institution of which they are a part and provide all of the following:
- 1. an organized collection of printed or other materials or a combination thereof;
- 2. staff trained to provide and interpret such materials as required to meet the informational, cultural, recreational, or educational needs of clientele;
- 3. an established schedule in which services of the staff are available to clientele; and
- 4. the physical facilities necessary to support such a collection, staff, and schedule.
The IES survey employed both its own “level” categories and the “Carnegie Classification” for grouping institutions and their libraries. The Carnegie Classification is a widely used method of grouping “like” institutions. (“Like” is in quotation marks because it is difficult to identify two completely identical institutions; if nothing more, the enrollment demographics will differ.) Nevertheless, the classification is better than any other and is therefore widely employed when attempting to bring some structure to the diversity of U.S. colleges and universities.
Because the classification system is dynamic and subject to change as circumstances change, we based the following discussion on information available as of 2015 on the website of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/). Today there are thirty-three categories of institutions making up six broad groupings with subdivisions:
- Associate colleges (often referred to as community colleges by the public) are those institutions whose highest degree is the two-year associate degree or who grant less than 10 percent of their total degrees as four-year bachelor’s degrees. The majority of associate institutions are publicly funded.
- Baccalaureate colleges offer more than 10 percent of their degrees as bachelor’s and grant fewer than fifty master’s degrees per year. The majority of institutions in this category are privately funded.
- Master’s colleges and universities award at least fifty master’s degrees per year and fewer than twenty doctorates in addition to offering bachelor’s degree programs. This grouping is a mix of public and private institutions.
- Doctorate-granting universities award twenty or more doctoral degrees per year, not counting “first professional” degrees such as law or medicine. The doctorates must be research based (PhDs). As with master’s institutions, there is a mix of public and private universities in this category.
- Special-focus institutions are primarily private and offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in a single field; sometimes the “field” can be rather broad such as art, design, or music. This category includes stand-alone medical and law schools (nonprofit or for-profit institutions). Having a single focus (e.g., an art school) does not always mean granting just one type of degree. There might be a dozen or more degrees, such as a bachelor’s in painting, another in ceramics, and the like, as well as a master of fine arts degree.
- Tribal colleges constitute the final group. Institutions in this group must be members of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. These institutions have funding from tribal, private, and federal sources. They generally offer only bachelor’s degrees, although some have vocational programs, and a few grant a master’s degree in a limited number of subjects.
We have structured our academic libraries courses by adopting a modified Carnegie approach: research universities, comprehensive universities, colleges, and community colleges. Research universities and their libraries (members of the Association of Research Libraries [ARL]) are the giants of U.S. higher education. They are considered giants in terms of staffing, enrollments, degrees granted (both in number and variety of subjects), funding, and public prestige. These institutions have programs for undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate work. They normally have a variety of professional graduate schools—education, law, library and information science, and medicine, for example—that offer professional degrees as well as higher degrees. Often they are the “flagship” in a state’s public higher education system. Their alumni are numerous and influential in public affairs. As giants, these institutions also dominate the direction and issues in higher education as well as best practices, including librarianship.
Comprehensive universities are, in many instances, striving to achieve research university status. (One of this book’s authors retired from a university that was striving “to become the Georgetown of the West.”) Research status is, in part, a function of numbers (such as degrees and overall size), but it is more complex than pure numbers, as we will discuss in later chapters. The primary differences between the two categories (comprehensive universities and research universities) are the research emphasis and the presence or lack of postgraduate programs. Comprehensive universities also offer fewer professional degrees and generally have fewer prize-winning faculty members. (In some state higher education systems, such as those of California, New York, and Texas, there may be both types of universities.)
Colleges offer the greatest range in size and degree programs. Enrollments vary from a few hundred to several thousand; a few are still single-gender institutions. They are undergraduate focused, although some offer a few master’s-level programs. In terms of sheer numbers, colleges are the most numerous. Many are or were religion based, as we will discuss in the next chapter. Funding is always a critical issue for smaller colleges,...
