Chasing Zeroes: The Rise of Student Debt, the Fall of the College Ideal, and One Overachiever’s Misguided Pursuit of Success

by Laura Newland

Laura Newland’s generation has worked the hardest to gain admission to elite colleges and paid the most to attend. But when Newland left her Alabama hometown and arrived at Duke University, she found a liberal arts campus unlike anything depicted in those glossy guidebooks. The hypercompetitive battle for internships begins freshman year, and the economic pressures—student loans, the daunting cost of graduate degrees, high unemployment—are relentless. This perfect storm, brewing on campuses across the country, has fueled a Wall Street recruiting machine that is winning over the best and the brightest. In no time, Newland was seduced. From Newland’s turbulent four years comes a provocative story of the higher education industry; the tension between ambition and indebtedness, privilege and purpose; and one student’s journey to make sense of it all.

Genres: Nonfiction

220 pages, Paperback

First published September 18, 2013

Reviews

[M.J. McDermott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting story of a finance student at Duke and her driven quest to be like all the other finance students and land the big internship on Wall Street. I appreciated her honesty about how students like these get caught up in the money game straight out of college with huge loans to pay off.

[Walter Shaw - · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars feels about right. Not a lot happens in this book unfortunately, the stories that the author tells are interesting but ultimately inconsequential.