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Is College Worth It?
- A Former United States Secretary of Education and a Liberal Arts Graduate Expose the Broken Promise of Higher Education
- Narrated by: Tommy Cresswell
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
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Publisher's summary
Explore the answer to a critical question: Should we keep sending our kids to college? The American system of higher education comprises some of the best universities, teachers, and students the world has ever seen. Millions of students around the globe want nothing more in their life than to attend an American university.
However, many of America’s colleges and universities today have serious academic, institutional, and other performance problems, and it is quickly approaching a crisis point, if it’s not there already. Despite some excellent colleges and quality programs at many colleges, too much of higher education is wildly expensive. Students often graduate having learned little, or don’t graduate at all.
They are indoctrinated with liberal politics and subjected to all types of non-academic distractions. For these reasons, many students would be better served exploring other educational alternatives.
In Is College Worth It?, William J. Bennett and David Wilezol assess the problems of American higher education at various levels, from runaway costs to inferior academics to poor graduation rates to political indoctrination, and propose serious reforms and alternative methods for improving higher education so that it better serves our students.
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Story
Moving to America in 2008, Finnish journalist Anu Partanen quickly went from confident, successful professional to wary, self-doubting mess. She found that navigating the basics of everyday life - from buying a cell phone and filing taxes to education and childcare - was much more complicated and stressful than anything she encountered in her homeland. At first she attributed her crippling anxiety to the difficulty of adapting to a freewheeling new culture. But as she got to know Americans better, she discovered they shared her deep apprehension.
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A non-radical perspective on two societies
- By kwdayboise (Kim Day) on 06-20-17
By: Anu Partanen
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That Used to Be Us
- How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back
- By: Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 16 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, analyze those challenges - globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption - and spell out what we need to do now to rediscover America and rise to this moment.
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We have met the enemy and it is us.... Pogo
- By Soudant on 09-16-11
By: Thomas L. Friedman, and others
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Excellent Sheep
- The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
- By: William Deresiewicz
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale's admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to "practical" subjects like economics and computer science, students are losing the ability to think in innovative ways.
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skip the book read the essay
- By Amazon Customer on 05-07-15
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The End of College
- Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
- By: Kevin Carey
- Narrated by: James Yaegashi
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Exploding college prices and a flagging global economy, combined with the derring-do of a few intrepid innovators, have created a dynamic climate for a total rethinking of an industry that has remained virtually unchanged for a hundred years. In The End of College, Kevin Carey, an education researcher and writer, draws on years of in-depth reporting and cutting-edge research to paint a vivid and surprising portrait of the future of education.
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40 pages of content inflated to 250 pages
- By Brian Dickinson on 04-28-15
By: Kevin Carey
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Losing Ground
- American Social Policy, 1950 - 1980
- By: Charles Murray
- Narrated by: Robert Morris
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning in the 1950s, America entered a period of unprecedented social reform. This remarkable book demonstrates how the social programs of the 1960s and ’70s had the unintended and perverse effect of slowing and even reversing earlier progress in reducing poverty, crime, ignorance, and discrimination. Using widely understood and accepted data, it conclusively demonstrates that the amalgam of reforms from 1965 to 1970 actually made matters worse.
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A great book ruined by a terrible recording
- By Michael on 04-05-13
By: Charles Murray
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Third World America
- How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream
- By: Arianna Huffington
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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America's middle class, the driver of so much of our economic success and political stability, is rapidly disappearing, forcing us to confront the fear that we are slipping as a nation - that our children and grandchildren will enjoy fewer opportunities and face a lower standard of living than we did. It's the dark flipside of the American Dream - an American Nightmare of our own making.
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Sad... but with a ray of hope
- By Maciej on 10-20-10
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Average is Over
- Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
- By: Tyler Cowen
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The widening gap between rich and poor means dealing with one big, uncomfortable truth: If you're not at the top, you're at the bottom. The global labor market is changing radically thanks to growth at the high end and the low. About three quarters of the jobs created in the United States since the great recession pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Still, the United States has more millionaires and billionaires than any country ever, and we continue to mint them.
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Disappointing analysis of future
- By JKBart on 12-10-13
By: Tyler Cowen
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Equal Is Unfair
- America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
- By: Don Watkins, Yaron Brook
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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We've all heard that the American Dream is vanishing, and that the cause is rising income inequality. The rich are getting richer by rigging the system in their favor, leaving the rest of us to struggle just to keep our heads above water. To save the American Dream, we're told that we need to fight inequality through tax hikes, wealth redistribution schemes, and a far higher minimum wage.
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While I agree with most of this book,...
- By Wayne on 12-30-16
By: Don Watkins, and others
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The New Geography of Jobs
- By: Enrico Moretti
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Today, there are three Americas. At one extreme are the brain hubs with workers who are among the most productive, creative, and best-paid on the planet. At the other extreme are former manufacturing capitals that are rapidly losing jobs and residents. The rest of America could go either way. For the past 30 years, the three Americas have been growing apart at an accelerating rate. This divergence is one the most important developments in the history of the US and is reshaping the very fabric of our society. But the winners and losers aren't necessarily who you'd expect.
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Almost Stopped Listening
- By R. Hartley on 03-29-19
By: Enrico Moretti
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The Global Achievement Gap
- Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills our Children Need - and What We Can Do About it
- By: Tony Wagner
- Narrated by: Paul Costanzo
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Education expert Tony Wagner situates our school problems in the context of the global knowledge economy and analyzes the skills necessary for our young people to succeed.
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made obsolete by 'MostLikelyToSucceed'-still great
- By MichaelS on 04-01-16
By: Tony Wagner
What listeners say about Is College Worth It?
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Wade M. Hampton
- 01-19-20
Very good book
super book. very thought provoking. I would highly recommend this book to young and old
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- Saima Shaheen
- 05-11-15
A must read for every parent thinking about sendin
Excellent book that i will own as a reference. This book delivers all the insider information that has a critical role in choosing your future college .
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jim
- 01-12-17
Uninsightful, inconsistent, and ideological
This is just another book written by politicians/businessmen to provide their own political/business interests. My two main regrets are: 1) wasted time listening to obvious advice; 2) paying money for them.
This book promotes William Bennett's own company (K12) and other companies affiliated to him (e.g. Udacity).
The book reads like a long winded commercial with superficial arguments using limited and selective data (e.g. PayScale) to support them. The authors also used this opportunity to promote their own political and religious views, masked in form of education and financial advice, without presenting other views. In addition, many of the key arguments presented by the authors were inconsistent throughout the book.
Although the book pointed out high financial costs of U.S. education and questioned its effectiveness in training the American workforce, it made no effort to compare and draw insights from successful and relevant countries such as Canada, Australia, and Sweden. These countries offer cost-effective and high quality public education to their citizens in which American companies and universities recruits heavily from. Having been a former United States Secretary of Education, it is unlikely that Mr. Bennett is unaware of this information, but more likely it is ignored because it runs counter to his own political beliefs.
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3 people found this helpful