Abstract

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.

Bonnie Urciuoli is Leonard C. Ferguson Professor of Anthropology Emerita at Hamilton College. She has published extensively on linguistic and cultural anthropology, specializing in public discourses of race, class, and language and particularly the discursive construction of "diversity" in U.S. higher education.

“[An] excellent and very significant volume….a remarkably interesting, well-argued, ethnographically rich book of real weight and consequence...A highlight is the combination of more ethnographic, analytical chapters by faculty scholars and quite telling and affecting reflections by undergraduates (or recent graduates).” · Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz