Research indicates that the llcollegefor all" policies encouraged by well-intentioned but misguided educators are preventing many students from getting crucial information about how they are doing, seeing the full range of their desirable options, assessing the appropriateness and likely outcomes of available options, and identifying actions that can improve their career outcomes. Educators and students must be made to understand that "college for all" policies stem from popular misconceptions about the desirability of college for everyone and the undesirability of jobs after high school. Educators and students must also understand that .changing economic and labor market conditions have led to new rules of college and the labor market (skill demands have increased dramatically, earnings for those with less education have declined, college is more available, and community colleges have open admissions). It is particularly important to realize that students can improve their chances for getting good jobs by having better academic achievement and better noncognitive behaviors, taking vocational courses, getting job placement help from teachers, and working to improve their employment prospects before leaving high school. New policy actions to give students and educators better information and help students make more effective career plans must provide specific guidelines about selecting specific college and labor market options, useful evaluations in the form of tests and ratings, and trusted communication channels that provide authoritative information. (Contains 72 references.).

In the United States, it is rare that people of different races and social classes live together in the same housing developments and neighbourhoods. The Gautreaux programme, one of the most innovative and extensive court-ordered desegregation efforts ever, in which thousands of low-income, African-American families voluntarily moved from Chicago's inner city to mostly white, middle-class suburbs, was specifically designed to help redress this problem. This is the story of this unique experiment in racial, social and economic integration that began in 1976 and ended only last year. The book tells of the Gautreaux families' initial discomfort and of the discrimination they felt. Yet it also relates how, against the odds, their lives changed for the better, in employment and education, exploding the notion that poor, inner-city blacks cannot escape the "culture of poverty". Today, with vouchers and certificates replacing public housing, the Gautreaux success story is the most valuable record of the possibilities and limitations of mobility programmes.