"A struggling PhD student makes a shocking discovery about a famous Chinese American poet that sets into motion a series of escalating events, both humorous and fraught, that culminates in an incendiary reckoning of her relationships, beliefs, and identity"-- Provided by publisher.

Taking readers into the homes of middle-class families to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life, the author describes the profound moral conflicts for parents take on enormous debts and gamble on an investment that might not pay off.

Every spring thousands of middle-class and lower-income high-school seniors learn that they have been rejected by America's most exclusive colleges in favor of wealthy white students with lesser credentials. This Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter argues that America is rapidly becoming an aristrocracy in which the richest families receive special access to elite higher education. Based on two years of investigatiaave reporting and hundreds of interviews...

"In 1982, a new executive at Sallie Mae took home the company's financial documents to review. "You've got to be shitting me," he later told the company's CEO. "This place is a gold mine." Over the next four decades, the student loan industry that Sallie Mae and Congress created blew up into a crisis that would submerge a generation of Americans in $1.5 trillion in student debt. In The Debt Trap, Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell tells the...

"This book explains why college applicants and educators should disregard the college ranking industry; rankings mislead consumers, undermine academic values, and perpetuate social inequality"-- Provided by publisher.

"A renowned academic leader identifies the ways America's great universities should evolve in the decades ahead to maintain their global preeminence and enhance their intellectual stature and social mission as higher education confronts the twenty-first-century developments in technology, humanities, culture, and economics."--Dust jacket. "Jonathan R. Cole, former provost and current University Professor at Columbia University, addresses some of...

"Beating the College Debt Trap presents students with a better way to do college. The radically counter-cultural truth is that students don't have to be totally dependent on Mom, Dad, or Uncle Sam to get the most out of college. Graduation on a solid financial foundation is possible. But it will require intentionality, creativity, hard work, and a willingness to delay gratification.Chediak gets into the nitty-gritty of how to pay less for college,...

"Why the paradigm of the world-class university is an implausible dream for most institutions of higher education Universities have become major actors on the global stage. Yet, as they strive to be "world-class," institutions of higher education are shifting away from their core missions of cultivating democratic citizenship, fostering critical thinking, and safeguarding academic freedom. In the contest to raise their national and global profiles,...