A wide-ranging array of topics was examined in this year’s best higher education books, including student guides, research exposes, leadership advice and scholarship on tenure and academic freedom. Here’s a look at ten of the best titles for 2025.
In Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter—and What Really Does,” Ned Scott Laff and Scott Carlson discuss how students can create or “hack” successful journeys through college rather than getting lost in the undergraduate maze of course requirements, lousy advising, and “empty college degrees.” Their advice is for students to discover how to make college work by finding ways to combine their personal interests—or “hidden intellectualism”—with their ultimate calling or “vocational purpose.”
College presents ample opportunities for hacking if students learn to take advantage of the many “blank spaces” in the curriculum and if they engage with a personally fulfilling “field of study,” rather than becoming locked into rigid college majors. Along that path, they may become motivated to work on one of society’s “wicked problems;” those complicated, and perhaps unsolvable, challenges best addressed by broad educational experiences.
Read more at Forbes.
