Two distinct challenges stood in my way when I began to consider leaving academia. The first was psychological. By that point in 2015, my entire identity was bound up in my scholarly work.

Even in “normal” times, grad school is fraught with uncertainty – uncertainty around whether a degree is worth it, whether you picked the right program and whether they were smart to pick you, whether you can get enough funding to keep doing your work, whether you can publish enough to get a job, and whether there even will be any jobs when you’re done.

Any discussion of scholarly tools at Princeton University Press naturally begins with a reverent nod to the printing press—for obvious reasons but also in subtler ways. Since 1911, the Press’s headquarters have been housed in a timeless Collegiate Gothic building (later named for benefactor Charles Scribner), designed by Ernest Flagg and sitting at the edge of Princeton’s campus.

Caitlin Zaloom and Jennifer Morton discuss the financial pressures of paying for college and the impact on the lives and well-being of middle-class families.

The Advanced Placement program stands as the foremost source of college-level academics for millions of high school students in the United States and beyond. More than 22,000 schools now participate in it, across nearly forty subjects, from Latin and art to calculus and computer science.

​​​​​​​Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students.