A first-generation college student, hours from graduating, dreads leaving school and her faculty mentor for the "real world" and her traditional, Eastern European parents.

When a young father is hired for an English instructorship position, he struggles to balance playing the role of a teacher and meeting the university’s demands for a published scholar.

Despite being on the verge of failing his English class, a forty-two-year old college student finds himself saving a life at his university.

At a New York university, an academically-gifted college sophomore becomes unlikely friends with a popular sorority girl on campus. Over the course of the year, their friendship slowly deteriorates, ending in lies, theft, and violence.

When the Great Depression hits a well-to-do family, an eighteen-year-old girl works at a ranch to put herself through college, enduring the difficulty of the work while also enjoying being away from the stifling environment of her home.

A college counselor watches anxiously as her teenage son applies to college without her help. As her son plans for his future, the counselor and her husband reflect on how quickly their lives have changed, seeking ways to steady themselves in the midst of middle age.

To earn enough money for college, a high school graduate takes a grueling factory job. He expects his only takeaway from the work to be a paycheck, but a mysterious coworker teaches him about the world and his place in it.

A mid-career academic at a New England college confronts a plagiarizing frat boy and unearths her own troubled past as a graduate student navigating a male-dominated field in the process.

Ruthie, an experienced writer, reflects on the scholarship opportunity that set her career in motion.

A freshman in college deals with loneliness and grief as she attends the weekly office hours of an English professor at her school, who happens to be the father of her friend who died of brain cancer.