If you worry about whether higher education can bring the American Dream to our younger generation, this book is a "MUST" read for you, as it is for me

Image via WikipediaThe Book:

Brown, Lauder, and Ashton, THE GLOBAL AUCTION (Oxford University Press 2011)

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Sociology/SocialIssuesWelfareState/?view=usa&ci=9780199731688

Here's what Inside Higher Ed said about the book when it came out a year ago:

College and university presidents in the United States and elsewhere regularly link the need for a higher education to individual and national needs for economic advancement. What if their underlying assumptions aren't true? Three social scientists from British universities challenge many of those assumptions in The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs and Incomes, just published by Oxford University Press. The authors aren't by any means anti-education, but they focus on how some countries -- by investing in education, raising educational attainment and still keeping wages low -- have added complications to the idea of an easy relationship between more education and more money.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/21/book_challenges_view_that_more_college_produces_better_economic_outcomes#ixzz1lQlUQWZo
Inside Higher Ed 


Twenty years ago, Robert Reich wrote in THE WORK OF NATIONS, "The global economy imposes no particular limit upon the number of Americans who can sell symbolic-analytic services worldwide.  In principle, all of America's routine production workers could become symbolic analysts and let their old jobs drift overseas to developing nations."


More recently, Thomas Friedman wrote in his best-selling THE WORLD IS FLAT, "America, as a whole, will do fine in a flat world with free trade --- provided it continues to churn out knowledge workers who are able to produce idea-based goods that can be sold globally and who are able to fill the knowledge jobs that will be created as we not only expand the global economy but connect all the knowledge pools in the world.  There may be a limit to the number of good factory jobs in the world, but there is no limit to the number of idea-generating jobs in the world."


Calling these words --- and echoes of them from President Obama and numerous other public officials --- "The Broken Promise,"  the authors of THE GLOBAL AUCTION warn us, "This faith in the endless potential to create middle-class jobs for those who invested in education resembles a secular religion.  The hold of this faith over current thinking is difficult to exaggerate despite the fallout from the (current) economic crisis.  This book explains why it would be more fitting in a fairy tale than in an account of reality."


As I read this book --- I just finished chapter two during my cardio workout last night --- I will shafe its ominous insights with you.