College (Second Edition)

What It Was, Is, and Should Be

By: Andrew Delbanco

Narrated by: Christopher Ragland

Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

This audiobook narrated by Christopher Ragland reveals the strengths and failures of the American college, and explains why liberal education still matters

As the commercialization of American higher education accelerates, more and more students are coming to college with the narrow aim of obtaining a preprofessional credential. The traditional four-year college experience—an exploratory time for students to discover their passions and test ideas and values with the help of teachers and peers—is in danger of becoming a thing of the past.

In College, prominent cultural critic Andrew Delbanco offers a trenchant defense of such an education, and warns that it is becoming a privilege reserved for the relatively rich. In describing what a true college education should be, he demonstrates why making it available to as many young people as possible remains central to America's democratic promise.

In a brisk and vivid historical narrative, Delbanco explains how the idea of college arose in the colonial period from the Puritan idea of the gathered church, how it struggled to survive in the nineteenth century in the shadow of the new research universities, and how, in the twentieth century, it slowly opened its doors to women, minorities, and students from low-income families. He describes the unique strengths of America’s colleges in our era of globalization and, while recognizing the growing centrality of science, technology, and vocational subjects in the curriculum, he mounts a vigorous defense of a broadly humanistic education for all. Acknowledging the serious financial, intellectual, and ethical challenges that all colleges face today, Delbanco considers what is at stake in the urgent effort to protect these venerable institutions for future generations.

©2023 Andrew Delbanco (P)2023 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

"The book does have a thesis, but it is not thesis-ridden. It seeks to persuade not by driving a stake into the opponent's position or even paying much attention to it, but by offering us examples of the experience it celebrates. Delbanco's is not an argument for, but a display of, the value of a liberal arts education."—Stanley Fish, New York Times

"A lucid, fair, and well-informed account of the problems, and it offers a full-throated defense of the idea that you don't go to college just to get a job. Delbanco's brevity, wit, and curiosity about the past and its lessons for the present give his book a humanity all too rare in the literature on universities."—Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books

"Delbanco is lovely at historical context. . . . He makes a plea for the great intangibles of a college education."—Katharine Whittemore, Boston Globe

A great listen for those pursuing higher education

I was required to finish this book for graduate school, and I actually took away more than I thought from it. From my prior experiences in education, I have heard things very similar to what's been referred throughout the book. It partially confirms everything I've thought about education while teaching me many historical contexts I wasn't aware of. Definitely worth listening more than once.