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Charles J. Sykes

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Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education Hardcover – August 9, 2016

by Charles J. Sykes (Author)

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The cost of a college degree has increased by 1,125% since 1978―four times the rate of inflation. Total student debt has surpassed $1.3 trillion. Nearly two thirds of all college students must borrow to study, and the average student graduates with more than $30,000 in debt. Many college graduates under twenty-five years old are unemployed or underemployed. And professors―remember them?―rarely teach undergraduates at many major universities, instead handing off their lecture halls to cheaper teaching assistants.

So, is it worth it? That’s the question Charles J. Sykes attempts to answer in Fail U., exploring the staggering costs of a college education, the sharp decline in tenured faculty and teaching loads, the explosion of administrative jobs, the grandiose building plans, and the utter lack of preparedness for the real world that many now graduates face. Fail U. offers a different vision of higher education; one that is affordable, more productive, and better-suited to meet the needs of a diverse range of students―and one that will actually be useful in their future careers and lives.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

St. Martin's Press
Publication date

August 9, 2016
Dimensions

6.75 x 1 x 10 inches
ISBN-10

1250071593
ISBN-13

978-1250071590
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"With telling statistics and piquant anecdotes...[Fail U. is] certain to stimulate a much-needed debate." --Booklist

"This is a book for our times and one of its most vexing problems."--Jack Fowler, Publisher, National Review

“Fail U. stirs the higher education pot at a timely moment, raising a number of important issues for consideration by both academics and the general public.” –New York Journal of Books

About the Author

Charles J. Sykes is the author of several books on current affairs and education, including Fail U., A Nation of Victims, and Profscam. He has written pieces for the Wall Street Journal and Time.com among others, and in 2016 was featured for his critiques of Donald Trump and conservative media in articles on the front page of The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and NPR. A longtime host of the #1 conservative talk-radio show in Wisconsin, he resigned that position and is now a regular contributor to MSNBC.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Press; First Edition (August 9, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250071593
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250071590
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1 x 10 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #977,533 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9,455 in Higher & Continuing Education

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Charles J. Sykes

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Charles J. Sykes, is the author of eight previous books including "A Nation of Victims," "Dumbing Down Our Kids," "Profscam," "The Hollow Men," "The End of Privacy," "50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School, "A Nation of Moochers," and "Fail U."

Charlie identifies as a conservative, but in "How the Right Lost Its Mind," he presents an impassioned, regretful and deeply thoughtful account of how the American conservative movement came to lose its values. How did a movement that was defined by its belief in limited government, individual liberty, free markets, traditional values and civility find itself embracing bigotry, political intransigence, demagoguery and outright falsehood? This book looks hard at the Trump era to ask: How did the American conservative movement lose so many traditional values?

Until he stepped down in December 2016 after 23 years, Sykes was one of Wisconsin's top-rated and most influential conservative talk show hosts. He is now an NBC/MSNBC contributor and a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard, where he also hosts the magazine’s daily podcast. In 2017, he was co-host of the national public radio show, "Indivisible," which originated from WNYC. Sykes has written extensively for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, New York Review of Books, Newsweek, Time.com, and other national publications. He has appeared on Meet the Press, the Today Show, ABC's This Week, Real Time with Bill Maher, as well as on PBS, CNN, Fox News, the BBC, and NPR.

Sykes is a member of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy and sits on the Advisory Committee for the Democracy Fund.

He lives in Mequon, Wisconsin with his wife and three dogs. He has three children and two grandchildren and spends way too much time on Twitter.

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Hard-hitting and convincing condemnation of higher ed in the US

Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2017

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This book chronicles the many problems of higher ed in the US, including soaring costs, indifferent or incompetent professors, academic research producing useless and pointless "knowledge", rampant political correctness and closed minds, and many others. Read this book and you won't want to spend the tens of thousands of dollars it costs to go to college or to send your kids. There must be a better way that is cheaper and without the bu11$#!+ of academia. Spend a few bucks and a few hours on this book before you spend a small fortune and years of life on college.

Charles Sykes is a conservative political pundit who, like many other conservative commentators, stoked the fires that led to Trump (he says that, himself). If you are pro-Trump, you will like this book. If you are anti-Trump, don't be dissuaded by the author's conservative perspective and reputation. His arguments are well documented and reasoned. I would even recommend this book to Democrats (like me) as a good intro to conservative commentary on America. After reading this book, I understand better what Republicans have been saying about rampant political correctness.

I also recommend a similar book, Higher Education? by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. Hacker and Dreifus are from academia (Hacker is a retired prof and Dreifus an adjuct prof), but they tell almost exactly the same story as Sykes.

14 people found this helpful

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JLaLiberte

Good read, and an important one if you have ...

Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2016

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Good read, and an important one if you have a child approaching college age. You will be shocked at the level of spending, out of control growth in salaries and administration staff at our universities.

One person found this helpful

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David L. Bahnsen

I Cannot Plead With You to Read it Emphatically Enough.

Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2017

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It would be difficult to say if I spent more time reading Charles Sykes’ new Fail U: The False Promise of Higher Education in a state of anger or of depression. The topic is near and dear to my heart for a variety of reasons, and Sykes’ book delivers on two promises: (1) An indisputable exposure of the maddening scam and fraud that today’s college ecosystem has become; and (2) A demonstration of the potential path to its real undoing. My desire would be for every parent with children between the ages of 0 and 17 to read this book. For those not so inclined, perhaps this review will accomplish some of the desired ends (or at least understanding).

I feel for the parents who have viewed a future college education for their kids as the guaranteed path to a life of success and fulfillment. College has been sold to our society for well over a generation now as the assurance that life in the middle class (or better) will be the pot of gold at the end of the [drunken?] rainbow. And like the cult of home ownership which so dominated the American psyche until 2008, it will (unfortunately) be rank economics and fiscal realities that cause this terrible cult to come to a fatal end.

The cost of a college degree has increased 1,125% since 1978, an inflation rate more than 4x that of general consumer prices. This unfortunate fiscal reality, the source of immeasurable financial pain and anguish for millions of people, has been accompanied by not a mere dilution of the value of such a degree, but a complete and total collapse of that value. The universities have managed to increase the quantity and pay levels of their bureaucrats, administrators, and “other professionals” several times over, but full-time faculty that actually teach their undergraduate students are simply impossible to find. What is interesting is that no one, and I mean no one, on the other side of this issue denies any of these facts. This suggests to me either a callous disregard for the well-being of young people, or a pathological interpretation of what is best for them. I would be curious if any defender about the higher education culture would deny any of these facts:

The cost of college tuition has skyrocketed multiples higher than base inflation
Administrator and bureaucrat salaries and positions have exploded with these tuition increases
Aggregate student debt is now well over $1 trillion in American society, far more than total auto loans or even total credit card debt
In exchange for this massive financial burden students are receiving the thrilling experience of Teacher Aids doing all classroom work, assuming there is any classroom work
Average college graduate wages have declined 15%, and 53% of college graduates between the ages of 21 and 29 are unemployed or under-employed (the latter being defined as having a job that no one believes required a college degree whatsoever)
I will add as a finance guy that in the decade before the housing bubble burst the nation’s total mortgage debt inexplicably went up 300%; in the last decade our aggregate student loan debt has gone up 600% … To believe that this is going to end well is to indicate that you will likely believe anything.

It is my opinion that the basic “business” of higher education as laid out with simple, non-controversial facts above, is perverse and unacceptable. But sadly it doesn’t come close to telling the whole story. Once one swallows the pill that they are paying stratospheric costs for totally declining trade-offs, they also have to accept that the students are learning virtually nothing, the experience exists for the purpose of giving the students a 4-6 year span of unbridled hedonistic opportunity, the “research” coming from academia has lost any sense of utility or application, and the universities themselves have become the worst sort of coddlers of these “special snowflakes” we used to call young adults. Sykes goes to great effort to demonstrate the absurdities that take place on college campuses every single day, not as outliers, but as a core part of the normative experience in today’s academia.

I believe parents put up with this scam because there is parental pride that comes from telling their friends that their kid went to or graduated from XYZ University. And I believe donors put up with it because their large donations serve as an existential validation of whatever it is they have done with their adult lives. I think these are pitiful reasons to tolerate the pillaging of our young people (their wallets, their minds, and their souls), and it needs to stop. My first wish would be that we as a society would come to the obvious conclusion that the system is broken and must change, free of a total collapse or painful fallout. My prediction, and this is one I would bet my hard-earned lot in life on, is that it will take the financial bubble bursting. The feds will see such unbelievable defaults in the student debt they are owed, and the write-downs politicians prescribe will be such deficit debacles, that the access to free and reckless money will dry up. This will force universities to compete for students, driving prices down, and utterly collapsing the pig-fest of campus amenities and bureaucratic wastes of human flesh that flood their payrolls. Then and only then will the entire delivery of advanced education be modernized, and already available technological advances be fully harnessed to provide elite subject matter expertise to those who actually want to learn and be more prepared for adult life, vocationally and otherwise. If this sounds like wishful thinking, you are right – I wish for this, and then some. But it is more than wishful thinking, because it is going to happen.

The unfounded claims that one in five women are sexually assaulted on college campuses bother me, but it is a symptom of the real problem, not the problem itself. The systemic grade inflation and academic fraud discovered on a monthly basis across athletic programs (and often in non-athletic programs as well) is also a symptom, not the problem. While I am glad to hear that Washington State has “the largest Jacuzzi on the west coast” for their student body to enjoy, and that nationally $15 billion per year is being spent on campus renovations, generally having nothing to do with education whatsoever, the fact of the matter is that even these insulting atrocities are not the heart of the matter.

The core iniquity in today’s higher education system is that it became based on a truly faulty objective a generation ago (“get a four-year degree and you will achieve economic security”), and then to make matters worse, it hasn’t even come close to delivering on that faulty objective! What went astray was the death of the university as the place to expand intellectual growth and productivity. A classically liberal education that better prepares the student for the challenges of life – that stimulates their passions – that encourages them to wrestle with the great questions of life – has gone the way of the hula hoop (and it began to do this around the same decade as the hula hoop, too). Charles Murray points out that, for now, there actually is still a compensation premium for college graduates vs. non-college graduates; the big question is WHY there is … It most certainly cannot and will not last. Do real employers with real experience and a real assessment of the profit/loss realities of their business actually believe that the candidates they are interviewing gained some experience in their college years that will be fruitful to that employer’s business? Of course not! No way. This compensation premium will dissipate even more through time just as the gainful employment rate for college graduates has stooped to levels never thought possible. This is not a cyclical trend; it is a structural reality. The system needs to be burned to the ground.

And burn to the ground it shall.

In its place, a system that favors students and fiscal responsibility will be found. The myth that every high school graduate should go to college will fall apart. The assembly line educational model will die. And elite professors from elite universities will re-surface, creating incredible content because market forces will demand such. Trustees will be forced to act. Faculty will be forced to adopt. And parents will be forced to admit that they have passively played a role in letting this preposterous scam continue for far too long.

Charles Sykes’ tremendous book provides the case for why this must be, and that it will be. And I cannot plead with you to read it emphatically enough.

18 people found this helpful

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William

This Is An Excellent Book Telling About Some Of The Problems In The College System.

Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2017

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This is an excellent book telling about some of the problems in the college system. Here are some of the things that this book mentions: The cost of a college degree has soared by 1,125% since 1978, four times the rates of inflation. In 2011, 53% of college graduates under 25 were unemployed or underemployed. A survey showed that only 38% of recent college graduates thought the degree was worth the cost. In 1970, less than 1% of taxi drivers had college degrees. Four decades later, more than 15% of taxi drivers do have college degrees. Only one out of five community college students go into four year colleges. 1/3rd to ½ of recent college graduates have jobs that usually go to High School graduates. From 1993 to 2009, the number of administrators in U.S. universities rose by 60%, ten times the rate of growth of tenured faculty. If over the past three decades, car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000. Not all good jobs have a Bachelor’s degree for a requirement. College created a class of untouchable aristocrats who can’t be fired no matter how bad of a job they did in teaching or whether or not they do any valuable research.

4 people found this helpful

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Rudy Martz

I enjoyed this book

Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2017

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I enjoyed this book. It was spot on. College is increasingly becoming a vehicle to keep leftist academics employed. My son had to take over 30 credits that had nothing to do with his major, including the history of baseball. This is an interesting course and one I would not mind taking for audit, but why does a criminal justice major need to take such elective courses.

Unfortunately, I am beginning to doubt the authenticity of the author. Mr. Sykes has apparently hitched his wagon to MSNBC and NPR. He is a Never Trumper, who is upset neo-con candidates Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush got their clocks cleaned in the GOP primaries. Trump was not my first, second, third or even sixth choice, but he won and his conservative agenda has been obstructed primarily by RINOs and folks like Mr. Sykes. Nonetheless, if you can stomach the author's political about face, this book is very well researched.

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SS Seymour

Fail U is spot on ....

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 10, 2016

Verified Purchase

Excellent book that captures ALL that is wrong with Higher Education, not only in the US but the UK, as well. As universities squander the trust of students (and their hard earned money) on everything but their primary mission, universities will continue to grow 'in the wrong direction' (the support function), whilst students suffer from bad teaching and ill-preparation for their careers ....

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