One of my 2025 goals is to read more nonfiction. This came across my shelf and seemed pertinent to me: though not a scholar of the university system, it’s a system I’ve been tied to as an undergraduate and graduate student.

Clear and thoroughly structured, but sometimes at the cost of being dense or tedious to read. Naturally, a great deal of data and examples goes into a book of this caliber. Not necessarily something I’d pick up as an everyday read.

Waffling between 3.5 and 4 stars, but I think the book is really solid—perhaps I am not the perfect audience.

Thank you to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for the ARC.

As a scholar, and a citizen who frequently thinks about the position of higher education, I benefited a lot from this book where we a detailed exploration of how the public university functions, via one public research university - where the money is spent was a topic that particularly gave me fresh insights.
If you wish to learn more about how public universities changed and function, I recommend this book. It may be one of the few and one of the best of those few books about this topic.