Is College Worth It?

Dear National Review Friend, Because we know G-File and Morning Jolt readers are keen on forthcoming conservative books, from time to time we like to provide you a heads up when one is looming. Heads up! I want to encourage you to head to your local bookstore today to purchase a copy of Charles Sykes' new work, Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education. Or save the gasoline and order at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The author of the classics Dumbing Down Our Kids and Profscam, Sykes -- famous for his website Right Wisconsin and his popular Milwaukee-based daily radio program -- in Fail U., explores the over-priced, under-performing, grievance-crazed, and student-indenturing American higher-education complex, and lays out a bold blueprint for dramatically lowering costs and fixing the broken model of higher education. Officially out today (August 9th), Fail U. has received terrific advance praise, including this from the respected Booklist: With telling statistics and piquant anecdotes, Sykes indicts higher educators for teaching students little about the humanities, mathematics, or the sciences, while indoctrinating them in rigid new political orthodoxies. Laying out a bold agenda for reform, Sykes calls for a university system smaller and less dependent on government largesse, less politically correct, and more open to online instruction than the one now bankrupting many students and their families. Certain to stimulate a much-needed debate. Fail U. is a must-have for anyone concerned with the shocking decline of America's colleges. Provocative, persuasive, clear-eyed, and even amusing, it explores the staggering costs of a college education, the sharp decline in tenured faculty and teaching loads, the explosion of administrator jobs, the grandiose building plans (gyms, food courts, student recreation centers), the hysteria surrounding the "epidemic" of campus rapes, "triggers," "micro-aggressions," and other forms of alleged trauma, and so much more. But Sykes' task is not to compile a list of failings and grievances. One of the conservative movement's leading sustained voices on the crises strangling higher ed, his real and commendable purpose -- which he achieves -- is to provide important solutions (long-overdue!) that are affordable, productive, and better-suited to the needs of a diverse range of students. This is a book for our times and one of its most vexing problems. Don't fail to get Charles Sykes' Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education. Again, it is available at local bookstores, or online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Best, Jack Fowler Publisher, National Review Manage your National Review e-mail preferences or unsubscribe. To read our privacy policy, click here. This e-mail was sent by: National Review, Inc. 215 Lexington Avenue, 11th Floor New York, NY 10016