Holiday time means that you’re probably looking for gifts.  If you’re in the market for books related to higher education, I’ve got two recommendations for you.

The first is, The University: An Illustrated History.   It’s a coffee-table book, too unwieldy even for reading in bed, let alone on an airplane.  But who cares?  It’s as good a single-volume history of higher learning as has ever been written; it’s admirably global in scope, and it does a very nice job of balancing the institution’s long history (which, let’s face it, can get pretty tedious, especially in the later middle ages) with a series of short articles describing current tensions and policy issues.  The only slight niggle is that, for a global history, it probably pays too much attention to Spanish and Latin American universities, but that just reflects the fact that the editor (it’s actually a collection of essays rather than a single monograph) is from the University of Valladolid,  and the book was originally published in Spanish.

What’s special about this book, though, is its photos and illustrations. It’s nice to be reminded just how stunning, varied, and experimental campus architecture can be.  Quite lovely.

The second book isn’t about higher education, per se, but is nevertheless highly relevant: economist William J. Baumol’s, The Cost Disease: Why Computers get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t.  Baumol’s “cost disease” is simply the name for the phenomenon, first noted in the 1960s, of how labour-intensive goods (including higher education) get more expensive relative to capital-intensive goods, over time.  This is because when real wages rise in more productive fields of endeavor, they have to increase in less productive ones, too, otherwise everyone would leave and go elsewhere.  The result: rising costs over time.

Some people think this is a huge problem, and that the only solution is to automate education so as to stop it from taking over an enormous portion of the national budget.  Baumol himself is more sanguine.   Why worry about the cost of health and education when the cause of cost-inflation (i.e. cost decrease of capital-intensive goods) is also the solution (i.e. people will have more money left over to pay for more costly, labour-intensive goods)?  It’s a message that both governments and students, who complain about out-of-control costs, need to internalize.

Long term, the effect of having two parallel economies – one composed of “productive” sectors which generate cash but not many jobs, and “labour-intensive sectors”, which suck cash from elsewhere, but create jobs – has some important political ramifications that we haven’t yet absorbed.  My only criticism of Baumol is that he leaves this important issue unaddressed.

Joyeux Noel!