Mike Colahan

Career School Mike Colahan

Publisher Marketing: Founded in 1907, the Burr Colleges were once the premier secretarial and liberal arts junior colleges in the country. Many affluent families sent their daughters to be educated at Burr. So did movie stars, politicians, and Presidents. But it is now the 1990s and times have changed. Fewer women are choosing secretarial careers, and it is becoming harder for the colleges to recruit their classes. When Oliver Dunbar, director of the Philadelphia campus, fails to enroll enough students for a critical class sit, he gets a scary call from his superiors: get the student body count up or be fired. In desperation he hires Lily Espirito to be his new admissions director, even though Lily's last two schools were closed by the Department of Education. Beautiful and ruthless, Lily brings a "take no prisoners" approach to student recruitment, and the staid, principled Burr College will never be the same. Told with humor, compassion, and keen insight, Career School reveals the dynamics that drive small college management in the face of greed, scandal, human frailty, and tough economics. Along the way the reader meets the many characters that fill the offices, halls, and classrooms of the Burr College. These include the dean, a single woman raising four boys on her own, and who exercises the same iron will over her faculty as she does her household; the business officer, who wouldn't mind working at a college if it weren't for all the students; an English teacher who compensates for his feelings of mediocrity by seducing the prettiest girls in his classes; a financial aid director who would rather be painting; and an eighteen-year-old high school dropout helplessly underqualified to face the rigors of a Burr education, yet who has pinned all her hopes that a degree from this college will allow her to escape from the worst housing project in the city. And finally there is Oliver, a kind-hearted Quaker and twenty-year education advocate, who sees the spiral his school is experiencing and has no idea how to stop it, until one fateful night opens his eyes to the real plight of his students, and inspiration touches him in the form of an unexpected new love.