Between Mission and Market: The Freshman Year in a Corporate Age focuses on the arrival of college freshmen at the moment of the transformation; it uses Adelphi University in suburban New York City to study an attempt to resolve first-year difficulties. As higher education institutions turn into enterprises run on business models, the pressures of getting into college, including the taking of the SAT and ACT, have induced stress, addictions, eating disorders, drug use, and mental problems. However, special programs to ease the first-year transition through counseling and support are run as cheaply as possible. This book confronts some of the cardinal controversies in higher education, particularly those affecting first-year students: high-stakes testing in general (particularly the SAT), the intensification of student debt and the financial sentence imposed upon all who incur it, and the dramatic pressures placed upon freshmen as they transition to college.
