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Career education has become an extraordinarily prominent educational reform movement in the last few years. It takes, as its basic premise, the contention that education does a poor job of preparing students to enter the labor force. Career educators propose to change this situation by integrating work skills into curricula and improving job and educational counseling curricula. In this article, Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson question whether career education is an appropriate response to the problems it addresses. First, they argue that career education is basically a reconstitution of vocational education, an earlier reform with a similar purpose, and that career education is likely to replicate vocational education's failures. Second, they argue that the assumptions career educators make about education, work, and the labor market are erroneous, and present a variety of evidence to support their argument. Grubb and Lazerson conclude that the ills career education proposes to solve—unemployment, underemployment, and worker dissatisfaction—are intrinsic to our economic system, and consequently that career education is a hollow, if not an invidious, reform.