Author discusses book on efforts to reform higher education

Image:  People in higher education tend to think of the Bill & Melinda Gates and the Lumina Foundations as relatively recent players in the world of academe. Actually, as Ethan W. Ris describes it, they are part of a tradition that is 115 years old—of philanthropists using foundations to reform higher education. He looks at the origins of this movement and its success and failures in Other People’s Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform (University of Chicago...