The urban campus

In The Urban Campus: Educating the New Majority for the Next Century, Peggy Gordon Elliott (president and professor of education at The University of Akron) discusses how major changes in society have created significant implications for the delivery of higher education. Dr. Elliott reveals that we cannot, with any degree of success, educate students while operating under the same assumptions and with the same models that were successful in the past. It is time to discard our old notions of what a college or university is and what the majority of students are like. It is especially important that policy makers and elected representatives, many of whom are products of higher education in the 1950s, understand that America is truly an urban culture and that many modern universities have multiple campuses with enrollments of 30,000 to 40,000, sometimes more. Students are no longer exclusively single white males - "New Majority" is made up of women, minorities, displaced workers, career professionals upgrading their skills, and senior citizens "upgrading" their knowledge. Members of this New Majority often do not graduate in the traditional four- or five-year span. . The Urban Campus: