Joshua Travis Brown, PhD, is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Writing Clinic at the Johns Hopkins School of Education as well as a Research Fellow with the Center for Skills, Knowledge and Organizational Performance (SKOPE) at the University of Oxford. His book, Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went From Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025 and is written in a compelling “scholarly novella” style that blends rigorous social science with a captivating narrative approach.
Capitalizing on College goes inside tuition-driven colleges and universities to show how the competition for student dollars led to an unsustainable building boom that created financial turmoil. Forced to innovate, schools adopted money-driven enrollment strategies that created tension with their mission to serve marginalized students. Based on 150 candid interviews with university leaders, the book offers a timely and fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the contradictory pressures now facing much of the higher education sector.
Brown’s writing is rooted in his own first-gen, working-class heritage and aims to support better alignment between institutions and the needs of students, especially those from marginalized backgrounds. To that end, his work has helped raise awareness of inequities across learning platforms, improve student mental health assessment, and disentangle complex accountability policies. Brown’s work has been supported by competitive grants from the National Science Foundation, British Academy, Buckner W. Clay Endowment, and ACUHO-I. His research has been published in a variety of academic outlets, including Scientometrics, American Journal of Education, Journal of American College Health, and Journal of College Student Development. Media coverage of his work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, NPR, USA Today, Inside Higher Education, Times Higher Education, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Keywords: Entrepreneurial leadership; organizational theory; strategic management; sociology of education; higher education public policy; mixed methods research.
See Joshua Travis Brown’s Substack, The Leading Edge.
