The Great Mistake

Anyone who seeks a trenchant, nuanced grasp of the situation in US public universities today, and of how we got here, should read this book. They will find themselves grateful for the insight, seriousness, and virtuosity with which Newfield has conducted his investigation.

Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake is probably the most important, and certainly one of the best, books published on higher education in this century. It should be essential reading for everyone—faculty members, administrators, trustees, philanthropists, and politicians—looking to rescue our floundering public higher education system from the pitiful morass into which it has descended.

The book’s prose is lively and accessible, incorporating parents’ and students’ perspectives as well as research by prominent scholars... This is an important, timely book. Highly recommended.

It’s well-written, passionately argued, and, for the most part, a lively read.

The Great Mistake is his third book on the subject and provides an incisive, convincing, and terrifying picture of the current condition of state universities, along with an analysis of how we got here and how we might repair all the damage that has been done.

A wonderfully readable and vitally important book. The Great Mistake is not only an impassioned call for the refunding of public higher education in the United States but a brief for the end of neoliberalism altogether.

Newfield exposes thirty years of casting the private sector as the most efficient benefactor of the public good. For higher education, the result has been soaring tuitions and expenses with plummeting services, fewer faculty, and diminished educational offerings. This book gives us an action plan to reverse this Great Mistake before it becomes a tragedy that dooms our youth and our nation’s future.

Public research universities are in trouble, and Christopher Newfield shows us why: they are run on false principles. In fact, sponsored research costs more than it brings in. Humanities departments yield profits that subsidize the sciences. And higher education really is a public good—in economic as well as idealistic terms. This learned and passionate book offers a thorough analysis and traces the path to recovery.

I’ve lived through the dismantling of public higher education and watched it crush students. Chris Newfield is right—policymakers have made A Great Mistake—and the nation will pay for it for decades to come. His analysis is astute and his prescriptions for change are spot-on. Read this book slowly and carefully, and then take action.

Who has paid the price for the privatization of American higher education? You have! Written with an insider’s financial detail and a scholar-citizen’s outrage, The Great Mistake is an intimate and definitive exposé of how our long experiment in corporate logic has failed the university and failed the students who leave it weighed down by debt but without the sophisticated knowledge they need and deserve. I can’t imagine a more eloquent case for higher education as a public good.

A devastating account of how American public universities became caught in a ‘doom loop’ that sees today’s students paying more to get less. Toughly argued, data driven, The Great Mistake delivers a compelling economic and political case for pubic reinvestment. Every higher-education policy maker, on both sides of the Atlantic, should read it.