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"The economic and educational disadvantages of low-income black students who struggle to complete college are well-documented. While black students at elite universities don't necessarily fit into that category, a new book says they face social and institutional obstacles of their own - obstacles that ultimately drive them away from the high-status, high-paying jobs that they're qualified for in fields such as engineering, science, finance and information technology. And while the reasons are complex, universities are partly at fault, the book argues."

"he Career Counselor's Handbook (2nd Ed.) by Howard Figler & Richard N. Bolles. Ten Speed Press, 2007, 301 pp. ISBN 9781580088701. $19.99 Both Figler and Bolles have over six decades of experience in the field of career development, and both have written best sellers about the subject, including The Complete Job-Search Handbook (Figler, 1999) and What Color is Your Parachute? (Bolles, 2009). Figler and Bolles have combined their experience to produce a practical guide with The Career Counselor's Handbook. The book includes a discussion of the history and definition of career counseling, a sample of tools, tips for dealing with difficult clients, an overview of the values that shape career work, and guidelines for establishing and maintaining a career in this field."

"Book Review: A Job Search Manual for Counselors and Counselor Educators"

"Beloit, Wis. - Born when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage, members of this fall's entering college class of 2014 have emerged as a post-email generation for whom the digital world is routine and technology is just too slow. Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit's Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. The Mindset List website at www.beloit.edu/mindset, the Mediasite webcast and its Facebook page receive more than 400,000 hits annually. The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since "digital" has always been in the cultural DNA, they've never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who's that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat. Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them. A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of sch

"For all the recent research and writing on happiness, studies that synthesize findings from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities have been notably missing, says Sissela Bok."

"Early in Ian Graham's new book 'Unbillable Hours,' a John Grisham-like true story of his work as a corporate lawyer and how he helped get a murder conviction overturned, he quickly comes to the realization that working at a big Los Angeles law firm wasn't the best career move. The money is great -- $120,000 as a first-year associate -- but as one of his colleagues points out, working 260,000 billable hours per year comes out to $40 an hour, or what he pays his cleaning lady."

"Interruptions at work, from email and phone calls to co-workers dropping by your office to talk, can complicate the juggle, extending your workday and draining personal time. But how far would you go to eliminate them? Would you book a conference room? Turn off your e-mail? Put up police tape outside your cubicle, to keep your co-workers away?"

No one has been writing best-selling career-advice books longer than Richard Bolles, author of the "What Color Is Your Parachute" series. (1975 was the only skipped year since the series was launched in 1970.)

: I'm in the process of changing my career and am looking for ways to be more productive. What do you think of the current popular methods discussed in books like Timothy Ferriss's "The 4-Hour Workweek" and David Allen's "Getting Things Done?"

The original, Post-World War II GI Bill has been both idealized as evidence of America as land of opportunity, and criticized for primarily benefiting white men while perpetuating racial and gender discrimination. So write Glenn C. Altschuler, a professor of American studies and dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions at Cornell University, and Stuart M. Blumin, professor emeritus of American history at Cornell, in their new book, The GI Bill: A New Deal For Veterans (Oxford). Altschuler and Blumin argue, instead, for a need to "gain a more dispassionate understanding of the bill's role in the shaping of postwar America" -- even up to the present day, as then-President Bush cited the legacy of the original GI Bill in the 2008 signing of a new, Post-9/11 GI Bill.

The only thing that never leaves our side is our education, our knowledge. Knowledge and education are not necessarily bound to books and classrooms. It is out in the world and in every step we take. The education and knowledge that we get from childhood leads us to the capacity to handle our life on our own.

"A few years ago I was - like some of you reading this - overextended, overworked, and deeply unhappy about it. I was a young psychology professor desperately seeking tenure, with two toddlers at home and a husband whose work kept him away for days at a time. I exercised once a week on a good week, rarely saw my friends or extended family, and couldn't remember the last time I'd read a book that wasn't about statistics. It was just too much. Something had to give. And it did. I left my job, not knowing exactly what I was going to do next. It was the toughest decision I've ever made, but it was also one of the best."

"Good teaching and exposure to students from diverse backgrounds are some of the strongest predictors of whether freshmen return for a second year of college and improve their critical-thinking skills, say two prominent researchers."