A cheaper, smarter road to college, and career

YOU MAJORED IN WHAT?
Mapping your Path from Chaos to Career
By Katharine Brooks
Viking, 320 pp., $25.95

HOW TO LOVE
By Gordon Livingston
DaCapo, 240 pp., $19.95

Crushing college costs and an unfriendly job market getting you down? Maybe it's time to look at the future a little differently.

Billed as the anticollege prep handbook, Maya Frost's exuberant "The New Global Student" promises that you can do better than blindly following the traditional hypercompetitive, ridiculously expensive college path. In 2005, entrepreneurs Frost and her husband sold everything, left the suburbs of Portland, Ore., and traveled with four teenage daughters to Argentina, where they found affordable, accessible ways to assure their children's education and success, with a global outlook.

Frost's children never submitted an SAT score or took an AP course and yet received amazing educations in places like Germany, Chile, Brazil, and Mexico, and got astonishing good jobs to boot. The cost for each girl's education was $35,000, which is about the cost of one year at a private college in the United States.

Frost is hilarious and impassioned, and she packs her guide with tips, tricks, and personal success stories. Don't use college year-abroad group programs, she insists, because they are usually expensive (around $20,000 per semester) and often turn out to be more about partying than learning. Instead, she urges, go solo to unfamiliar places and stay longer. Applying to foreign universities directly can cost as little as $5,000 a semester. There are even master's degree programs taught abroad in English that cost $10,000.

Still not sure you want your child to go abroad? Frost brings her global view back home. Have your child go for IB (International Baccalaureate) rather than AP courses in high school, because they give a broader world view. To save money and avoid the stress of SATs, consider having your child start at a community college and then transferring. Funny, innovative and meaningful, this is really a how-to guide with heart.

But don't just contemplate education from a new angle; start rethinking what your post-college career might be, as well. In "You Majored in What?" Katharine Brooks, director of career services for the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, eschews the direct route of choosing a major that will lead to a specific job. Instead, she uses what she calls "wise wandering," a system of positive psychology, chaos theory, and visual mapping techniques to help students - and anyone - figure out what skills they have, what personal values matter most to them, and how to channel it all into a career they'll love.

Using chaos theory, Brooks shows why unexpected events and new conditions can change your career path and open up choice. Forget trying to force a preordained order into your life, she insists, because chaos theory shows you that systems ultimately will unveil the order to you. Brooks has you make visual maps, listing events that have meaning in your life. Next she has you pick out the themes that can guide you to your true calling. Are there more things on your map that are done alone or in groups? That's the working environment in which you're most likely to feel comfortable. Do you do more physically or are you the cerebral sort? Even noticing a thing like playing pool can show you that you know how to think on your feet, a skill that's pivotal in some professions. By using the map, you can start to narrow your choices, or even come up with bold and unexpected new ones

Once you do decide on a major, Brooks shows how to use the power of story to adapt it to any field you want, and she even explains how and why a haiku can help you write a brilliant cover letter. Supportive, ingenious, and fun, Brooks's innovative career coaching can turn beloved interests into satisfying vocations.

Loving your work is important, but what about loving each other? "How to Love" by psychiatrist Gordon Livingston, provides a fresh approach to the way we learn to love. Love, says Livingston, depends on character traits we need to teach ourselves to recognize in others, like kindness, optimism, courage, and compassion, qualities that endure even as people change. A system for how to love, he feels, should be taught in schools, right along with math and science, because what is more important than passing on to a new generation the kinds of human behavior and personality traits that could contribute to their lifelong happiness?

Livingston argues that in learning to appreciate the personalities that will make us most happy in the long run, we're also transforming ourselves, because when we're with someone optimistic or kind we're more apt to exhibit those traits ourselves. So how best to choose the people we want to be with? Choose the partner who is the person you want to become, Livingston advises. Have a clear idea of the qualities you need to look for, don't excuse warning signals (a selfish person on a first date is going to be a selfish person at the wedding) and you are much less apt to make a mistake. As gracefully written as Erich Fromm's classic "The Art of Loving," "How To Love" recognizes the things in love that last, and may alter the way you look at others and yourself.

Caroline Leavitt's novel "Breathe" will be published by Algonquin Books next year. She can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com.