Career School

When the Burr College of Business fails to enroll enough students, its director, Oliver Dunbar, gets a frightful call from his superiors: fill the classrooms or be fired!

But Burr's specialty is teaching secretarial skills, and now, in the 1990s, fewer women are applying. Desperate, Oliver hires Lily Espirito as his new admissions director, even though Lily's previous schools were closed by the Department of Education. Beautiful and ruthless, Lily is willing to cheat, scam, and beguile to make her enrollment goals, a strategy that could destroy the Burr College once and for all.

Within the halls, offices, and classrooms of the Burr College, academic integrity clashes with primal passions and a never-ending need for revenue. A teacher routinely beds the prettiest girls in his class. A work-study student manipulates the rivalry between Admissions counselors. A high school dropout struggles to acquire the education she needs to escape Philadelphia's most dangerous housing project. And at the center is Oliver, a twenty-year champion of education, who feels his school's soul slipping away and doesn't know how to stop it. His fate turns on an unexpected late-night encounter, and a chance for love that he never knew was possible.

"Anyone working at a small college or university in today's competitive environment will identify with the challenges that Burr faces and enjoy the deftness with which Colahan portrays the administrative clashes that result. It is his ability to bring his characters to life—to make the reader care about them—that is the novel's greatest strength."

—Dr. Jonnie Guerra
Sr. Advisor, Council of Independent Colleges