Beet by Roger Rosenblatt ($24 Ecco, 2008).

As enrollment rates and grade inflation skyrocket, the student loan industry annually rakes in billions; meanwhile, curricula are increasingly trivialized. Though an increased number of Americans are entering the workforce with degrees, now more than ever, the value of higher education is in doubt.

The situation is probably not that dire. After all, the top baseball and basketball prospects often forgo college to earn quick millions. Not to mention college is extremely inefficient, as a group of scheming businessmen complain in Roger Rosenblatt's satire of academia, Beet: "We could teach them all they need to know in six months," one claims.

Coincidentally, as I write this review in a tiny dorm room in Austin, Texas, there's a stack of books on my desk for a History of Rock class, where we analyze the importance of music producers on pop culture.

So maybe Rosenblatt has a point. Or maybe academia (and liberal arts schools especially) need to start offering a course load with real world applications.

Beet, a searing and humorous indictment of American higher education, follows the decline of a fictitious, New England liberal arts school.

Marked by tradition, attended by the elite and paid for by the prestigious, Beet College is in trouble. The entirety of its endowment has been squandered and no one knows how to save the venerable institution. Though the Board of Trustees seems ready to sell anything not stapled to the ground, they hatch a "plan" to save the school by reforming its curriculum. Maybe it would have worked at Antioch, the well-known liberal arts college that shut its doors last year after ushering in the era of 1990s political correctness by adding the phrase "may I proceed to the level of intimacy?" to the national discussion.

Unfortunately, the task is left to the most rational and sane professor at Beet, the alliteratively named Professor Peace Porterfield. For most tasks, such qualities would come in handy, but Porterfield is burdened with leading a cadre of crazed faculty through weeks of painful committee proceedings in hopes of saving the school.

The Beet faculty is hopelessly torn between their high value of "the collective opinion of people in their mid teens" and academic duty. Desperate to engage students with a pointlessly creative curriculum, Beet College offers a Homeland Security major and classes that teach how to specifically write for The New York Times.

In attempting to describe some of the extreme absurdities in modern higher education, Beet's biggest fault is that it may not go far enough. After all, Syracuse University once offered a class studying the "cultural implications" of Lil' Kim.

Professor Porterfield's class, simply titled Modern Poetry, is wildly popular among students mainly because it simply aims to be useful "To [his] students, so they'll be able to live in the world more alertly, or interestingly ... "

Beet College is disorienting and brilliantly contrasted by Professor Porterfield's rational, albeit idealistic, outlook. Porterfield is something of a diversion from the "typical" satire protagonist like Yossarin from Catch-22 and Ignatius Riley from A Confederacy of Dunces. Those characters tend toward the absurd, often to match their surroundings. The power behind Porterfield is a normalcy that makes him relatable. Without Porterfield, it'd almost be easy to root for the school's destruction.

Rosenblatt's impressive narrative is marked with a subtle flair that distinguishes great from good. Armed with acute, incisive criticisms Beet successfully tackles college, though the topic is so easily satirized that it’s not a worthy adversary for the author.

In a sense, Beet could be used as additional fodder against traditionally liberal institutions. Instead, Rosenblatt intends to work toward practical solutions to fix very real problems at colleges.

Essential reading for professors and pupils alike--especially recent high school grads--Rosenblatt's second novel is a satirical slap to American academia.