The Years That Matter Most
author of How Children Succeed returns with a devastatingly powerful, mind-changing inquiry into higher education in the United States"-- "Does college still work? Is the system designed just to protect the privileged and leave everyone else behind? Or can a college education today provide real opportunity to young Americans seeking to improve their station in life? The Years That Matter Most tells the stories of students trying to find their way, with hope, joy, and frustration, through the application process and into college. Drawing on new research, the book reveals how the landscape of higher education has shifted in recent decades and exposes the hidden truths of how the system works and whom it works for. And it introduces us to the people who really make higher education go: admissions directors trying to balance the class and balance the budget, College Board officials scrambling to defend the SAT in the face of mounting evidence that it favors the wealthy, researchers working to unlock the mysteries of the college-student brain, and educators trying to transform potential dropouts into successful graduates. With insight, humor, and passion, Paul Tough takes readers on a journey from Ivy League seminar rooms to community college welding shops, from giant public flagship universities to tiny experimental storefront colleges.
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What Hacker News says
- You may be interested in Paul Tough’s “The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us”. Tough makes similar points like this throughout the book.
- For those interested in background on this, Paul Tough's 'The Years that Matter Most'[1] has a lot of really interesting, surprising facts about college admissions.
Many of the ideas touched on in the comments here so far are covered in much more detail in that book. One interesting fact is that although there is a lot of publicity from colleges about reaching out to lower income students, there are massive incentives (often necessities) for admissions offices to take less qualified kids who can pay full price.
Overall, I found the book a nuanced and surprising view of the realities of trying to manage college admissions, and of trying to deal with inequality in access to higher education.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Years-That-Matter-Most-College/dp/054...
- “In his new book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, Paul Tough explores this divide, and interrogates whether going to college has become a privilege of wealth and whether it can still lift people out of economic insecurity.”
How the hell do you “interrogate” an abstract proposition? We may as well not even have words if we’re going to use them this thoughtlessly.
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