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

Does college work? Would it provide real opportunity for young people who want to improve themselves and their potential clients? Or could it be just a rigged video game made to protect the elites who have power and exclude everyone else? For a lot of of us, our doubts and resentments about advanced schooling live hand and hand with an about The Years That Matter Most: How University Makes or Breaks Us appreciation, a good yearning, for the life-changing personal transformation that a college education can offer.

In these webpages, you will meet up with young people producing their way through this technique, with joy and frustration and sorrow: deciding how and where you can apply, cramming for the SAT, braving a unusual 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 advanced schooling 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 shapes that college in the us takes today, from Ivy Little league seminar rooms to community university welding shops; from large public flagships to small, innovative experiments in metropolitan storefronts.

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