This book should be required reading for high school and middle school teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators. (And it wouldn't hurt for the elementary school educators to read it, either.) It is also recommended for parents who are concerned about the types of curriculums offered in high schools today.

Gray and Herr say that the "one way to win" (i.e, the four-year college education) does not work for all students -- particularly many in what they call the academic middle. They say that many of these students enter four-year colleges ill prepared. They end up taking many remedial courses their first year, many do not finish college, and end up with high student loan debt.

They recommend that students start to prepare a career plan in middle school or the first year in high school. Such plans should include a realistic assessment of the student's abilities to undertake a four-year college program. For many students, moving into one and two-year certificate and associate degree programs which lead to highly skilled, highly paying jobs would be a better alternative than a four-year college. Other students would benefit from a school-to-work transition program.

In short, Gray and Herr say that the current academic system is failing many students, and we need to look at alternatives to help students succeed.

Positives:
Contains a huge amount of information - cites many, many studies.
Negatives:
Difficult to find the information because the subject index is so short and undetailed.

Also, I often had to reread whole paragraphs to get their meaning. This is partly due to the author's preference for complex sentence structure; partly due to the APA citation style which forces authors to cram huge citations into the middle of sentences.

This book is very expensive! I had to buy this book for a course and I hated it. Some of the sentences are 75 words long. I'm totally serious about that. The author speaks an intellectual language that is hard to understand. I hated reading it. The author could have said what he needed to say in about a quarter of the space. Please don't subject your students to this book. There has got to be better (and cheaper) textbooks about career counseling out there.