It is no secret that higher education is wrought with problems. Unmet expectations, high costs, and low faculty salaries: these are just a few of the many complaints rendered by students, parents, and employees. Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness addressed these issues and more in their 2019 book, Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education, published by Oxford University Press. In Cracks in the Ivory Tower, Brennan and Magness offer an argument, based on economic principles, that many of the issues facing higher education today can be explained by bad incentives which, in turn, makes those involved in academia engage in poor behavior. In each chapter, the authors explore a specific issue in higher education, including the bad incentives, relevant economic theories, and an occasional suggested remedy.

Since the opening of Harvard College—the first university in the United States—higher education reformation has not ceased. Reformers respond to the question of the purpose of a university. In Save the World on Your Own Time, author Stanley Fish attempts to answer this question by articulating the role of university educators in teaching students practical skills necessary to enter the workforce after college. Fish published his book with Oxford University Press in 2008 after decades of working in higher education as both an instructor and administrator. Fish combines anecdotes, personal research, and rebuttals of other scholars to present a thorough argument for why instructors should focus only on teaching skills in the classroom and leave no space for political agendas or moral development.

American higher education has slowly been refined to the present model, rich with choice and loosely held together by a common moral standard. The purpose of education has been changed since the establishment of the colonial colleges; likewise, the collegiate experience and curriculum also transformed to meet the demands of society over the past few centuries. Author Julie A. Reuben addresses these changes in The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality, published in 1996 through Chicago University Press. This book combines her doctoral dissertation with additional research to tell a story about how the colonial colleges from the seventeenth century slowly developed into modern American universities. Reuben combines general analyses of cultural and intellectual shifts with case studies from eight specific universities: California at Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Stanford, and Yale (9).