Dr. Johnny D. Jones' Empowerful Informatics: Optimizing Higher Learning and Maximizing Investment in Today's Economy presents a scholarly driven, yet a practical, book that is pointedly and purposefully titled, EMPOWERFUL INFORMATICS, to help students, parents, families, communities, and institutions of higher learning find the balance for personal empowerment, academic enlightenment, and economic efficiency. The authors have found that, too frequently, many families have misconceptions about the benefits of and the return on investing in higher education. From the author's collective experiences, too often, families perceive higher learning based on inaccurate data, incomplete data, no data, or information about options not far from their homes, neighborhoods, and communities. The phases and points of progress for EMPOWERFUL INFORMATICS are discussed in this guidebook through the eight points of the future, philosophy, anticipation, goal-setting, measurement, renewal, resource alignment, and human purpose/circling back over three phases. The book is quite timely, given the national conversations and movement concerning the cutting back and the curtailment of federal financial support for lower-income students many of whom are first-generation higher education seekers. This book is intended to reach the potential student as an idealist and the pragmatist, the dreamer and the doer, the farmer and the philosopher; and the scientist and the artist. As authors with over three decades of experience in adult, continuing, lifelong, higher, and other post-secondary education, we asked ourselves four fundamental questions in preparing and finishing this very timely book in today s unpredictable, uncertain, unsure, and chaotic global economy.