The Experience of Neoliberal Education (Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies Book 4)

"The college experience is increasingly positioned to demonstrate its value as a worthwhile return on investment. Specific, definable activities, such as research experience, first-year experience, and experiential learning, are marketed as delivering precise skill sets in the form of an individual educational package. Through ethnography-based analysis, the contributors to this volume explore how these commodified 'experiences' have turned students into consumers and given them the illusion that they are in control of their investment. They further reveal how the pressure to plan every move with a constant eye on a demonstrable return has supplanted traditional approaches to classroom education and profoundly altered the student experience"-- Provided by publisher Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION Neoliberalizing Undergraduate Experience CHAPTER 1 John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education in the Neoliberal Age CHAPTER 2 Undergraduate Research in Veblen’s Vision Idle Curiosity, Bureaucratic Accountancy, and Pecuniary Emulation in Contemporary Higher Education CHAPTER 3 Empathy as Industry An Undergraduate Perspective on Neoliberalism and Community Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania CHAPTER 4 Dirty Work The Carnival of Service CHAPTER 5 No Good Deed Goes Uncounted A Reflection on College Volunteerism CHAPTER 6 From Service-Learning to Social Innovation The Development of the Neoliberal in Experiential Learning CHAPTER 7 High Hopes and Low Impact Obstacles in Student Research CHAPTER 8 The Experience Experts CHAPTER 9 Moral Entanglements in Service-Learning CHAPTER 10 Engineering Success Performing Neoliberal Subjectivity through Pouring a Bottle of Water CHAPTER 11 Caught between Commodification and Audit Concluding Thoughts on the Contradictions in U.S. Higher Education Index