Accreditation. Merit salary systems. External rankings. Outcomes assessment. Program reviews. These strategies and many others were developed as ways of improving the quality of higher education. But as Jeffrey L. Buller—the author of such works as The Essential Department Chair, Positive Academic Leadership, and Change Leadership in Higher Education—argues in Reinventing College, they haven’t fulfilled their promise. At best, they’ve resulted in modest improvements that aren’t worth the time and cost they required. At worst, they harmed the quality of higher education by shifting administrators’ focus from what is actually important to what is easily measurable. Buller argues that colleges and universities must be reinvented, on both the small and large scales, if they are truly to serve the needs of students and society today.

Reinventing College is an excellent resource for administrators who are looking for new ideas, as well as for discussion groups and learning communities that want a book to help guide their discussions. (It even includes a list of questions for these groups to consider.) Affordable but authoritative, Reinventing College will give even those readers who disagree with every suggestion it contains plenty to think (and argue!) about.

PLEASE NOTE: A revised and updated version of this book was released in 2024 under the title Everything You Know About College Is Wrong (ALPHA Leadership Publicatons).