Salient reading for students, parents, and educators on navigating toward a coveted college degree.
A workforce and education expert weighs the perks and pitfalls of higher education.
Cappelli (Management/Wharton School; Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It, 2012, etc.) astutely examines the enduring relevance of a college degree despite problematic funding and postgraduate employment issues. In dense chapters full of illuminating statistical and survey data, the author reports on the affordability and effectiveness of a college degree, directing his assessment to benefit future students and their families. As he notes, astronomical tuitions figure greatly into the equation, as American college costs run about four times higher than in other countries, making the decision to attend a postsecondary school an increasingly risky one. Cappelli also examines the variation in degreed students who fail to achieve success in the postgraduate employment marketplace and those who become overwhelmed by the financial burden. The factors affecting these trends are in constant flux, writes the author, and vary from the labor market requiring functional job skills to the student dropout rate and the education-to-career paths that have evolved as rapidly as their corresponding business models and sophisticated hiring processes. Cappelli’s eye-opening report card on the current state of American education gives mounting tuitions a failing grade, though enrollment and retention numbers are promising. The author’s drilled-down conclusions suggest that students are matriculating at the same level today as they did years ago, but the expense alone has thrown many families into the depths of student loan debt or default. Whether or not investing in college is worth the risk is a major decision about which families and children need to educate themselves. “College is still accepted as necessary for advancement but also increasingly expensive,” writes the author, “and increasingly risky in terms of the likely career payoffs.”
Salient reading for students, parents, and educators on navigating toward a coveted college degree.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-526-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to...
A French academic serves up a long, rigorous critique, dense with historical data, of American-style predatory capitalism—and offers remedies that Karl Marx might applaud.
Economist Piketty considers capital, in the monetary sense, from the vantage of what he considers the capital of the world, namely Paris; at times, his discussions of how capital works, and especially public capital, befit Locke-ian France and not Hobbesian America, a source of some controversy in the wide discussion surrounding his book. At heart, though, his argument turns on well-founded economic principles, notably r > g, meaning that the “rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy,” in Piketty’s gloss. It logically follows that when such conditions prevail, then wealth will accumulate in a few hands faster than it can be broadly distributed. By the author’s reckoning, the United States is one of the leading nations in the “high inequality” camp, though it was not always so. In the colonial era, Piketty likens the inequality quotient in New England to be about that of Scandinavia today, with few abject poor and few mega-rich. The difference is that the rich now—who are mostly the “supermanagers” of business rather than the “superstars” of sports and entertainment—have surrounded themselves with political shields that keep them safe from the specter of paying more in taxes and adding to the fund of public wealth. The author’s data is unassailable. His policy recommendations are considerably more controversial, including his call for a global tax on wealth. From start to finish, the discussion is written in plainspoken prose that, though punctuated by formulas, also draws on a wide range of cultural references.
Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time high—and is only bound to grow worse.Pub Date: March 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-43000-6
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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