...A great majority of our nine million college students are not in school because they want to be or because they want to learn. They are there because it has become the thing to do or because college is a pleasant place to be; because it's the only way they can get parents or taxpayers to support them without working at a job they don't like; because Mother wanted them to go, or some other reason entirely irrelevant to the course of studies for which college is supposedly organized....

American journalist, public-relations specialist, and writer. Bird attended Vassar College, graduated from the University of Toledo, and received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1939). She worked as a researcher at Newsweek and Fortune in the 1940s, then moved into public relations, which she left after twenty years to write books that tracked the challenges faced by the women of her generation: The Invisible Scar (1966), a study of the lingering effects of the Great Depression; Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down (1968); Enterprising Women: Their Contribution to the American Economy, 1776–1976 (1976); Second Careers: New Ways to Work after Fifty (1992); and Lives of Our Own: Secrets of a Salty Old Woman (1995). Her best-known book, The Case against College (1975), argues that college is, for many students, an overpriced waste of time. See also mysite.verizon.net/vze3rtj5/ id4.html.