The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us Audiobook (Free)

The best-selling author of How Kids Succeed returns using a devastatingly powerful, mind-changing inquiry into higher education in america

Does university work? Would it offer real opportunity for young people who wish to improve themselves and their prospects? Or could it be simply a rigged game designed to protect the elites who have power and exclude everybody else? For a lot of folks, our uncertainties and resentments about higher education live hand and hand with an about The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us understanding, even a yearning, for the life-changing personal transformation that a college education can provide.

In these pages, you will meet young people producing their way through this technique, with joy and frustration and sorrow: deciding how and where to apply, cramming for the SAT, braving a strange new campus, negotiating changing family relationships, and looking for the resilience to recuperate from setbacks and downturns.

You’ll encounter the individuals who, behind the scenes, make higher education go: from an SAT tutor hacking the test and his college students’ stressed-out brains to a calculus professor turning potential drop-outs into math majors. And you will start to see the many designs that college in America will take today, from Ivy Group seminar areas to community college welding shops; from large open public flagships to tiny, innovative experiments in urban storefronts.

The Years That Matter Most will shake you up, it will inspire and enrage you, and it will make you think differently about who we are as a country – and whether the American imagine opportunity and mobility continues to be worthy of our faith.