The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be: by Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2022, 408 pp., $34.95 (paper).

"The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be" by Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner is a book that examines the state of higher education in the United States. The authors conducted 2,000 interviews over five years at ten colleges to gain insight into current expectations and experiences of higher education. The book explores different justifications for engaging in higher education, such as inertia, transaction, exploration, and transformation. While the book defends traditional humanist scholarship, it could have made a stronger case for the liberal arts. However, it lacks awareness of sociological problems associated with the university and does not consider the broader issues affecting higher education. Overall, the book provides a harmless addition to the library of defenses of liberal education. [Extracted from the article]