How College Works

Daniel F. Chambliss, Christopher G. Takacs

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674727038
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

A Chronicle of Higher Education "Top 10 Books on Teaching" Selection
Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone PrizeConstrained by shrinking budgets, can colleges do more to improve the quality of education? And can students get more out of college without paying higher tuition? Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs conclude that the limited resources of colleges and students need not diminish the undergraduate experience. How College Works reveals the surprisingly decisive role that personal relationships play in determining a student's collegiate success, and puts forward a set of small, inexpensive interventions that yield substantial improvements in educational outcomes."The book shares the narrative of the student experience, what happens to students as they move through their educations, all the way from arrival to graduation. This is an important distinction. [Chambliss and Takacs] do not try to measure what students have learned, but what it is like to live through college, and what those experiences mean both during the time at school, as well as going forward."
—John Warner, Inside Higher Ed

1

The Search for a Solution

In an era of fixed or even shrinking resources, can the quality of collegiate education be improved at no additional cost? Can students get more out of college without spending more money? We believe the answer is yes. We believe that there are methods—simultaneously reliable, powerful, available, and cheap—for improving what students gain from college. Such methods consistently work well, handsomely repay whatever effort goes into them, can be used by almost anyone, and require not much time and almost no additional money. When one knows where to look, these methods are available both to formally designated higher education leaders—deans, presidents, department chairs, and program heads—and also in varying degrees to individual professors, to parents, and even to students themselves. With a basic understanding of how college works, we suggest, almost anyone ready to act can noticeably improve what students get out of college. This book, then, describes the crucial experiences of a good undergraduate education, and formulates some effective interventions—methods for improvement—usable by leaders who want to make a difference.

To learn how college works, we began by trying to understand students’ own lives in college; after all, that is ultimately what leaders would like to influence. For ten years we followed a random sample of nearly one hundred students at our own institution (we’ll call it “the college”; the research and institution are more fully described below), trying to spot those decisive moments that changed the direction or intensity of their experience.

We quickly realized that students’ perspective is often significantly, and consequentially, different from that of administrators, teachers, and adults in general. They just see things differently. Consider incoming students’ view of their academic responsibilities. Freshman year happens long, long before senior year; it can be an overwhelming experience whose immediacy drowns out much longer-term planning. Academics are logistically important, but they are not necessarily the central activity in college.¹ Students don’t automatically assume that academic work is worthwhile; unfamiliar disciplines in particular need to be legitimated in their eyes. When students choose their courses, they give less attention to official “advisors” than to friends, dormmates, parents, and—when actually sitting at a computer and registering for courses—the online class schedule, which tells them what is open and fits their schedule. In making these choices, students base their registration decisions on the limited information that is easily available to them, irrespective of what may be “in the catalog,” on websites, or in the emails sent by academic advisors. Once enrolled, students are affected only by courses they actually take—all others are irrelevant, however good, or interesting, or rigorous, they may be for their own enrollees. (A seemingly obvious point, yes, but with huge implications.) When it’s all done, then, any one student is touched by only a few courses and a small percentage of professors; even among those few teachers, only one or two might really have a lasting impact. From an administrator’s perspective, then, students’ lived worlds can seem quite limited, their lines of sight rather short and their angle of vision rather narrow.

So while it’s important to understand and respect students’ experience—that is, after all, what leaders are trying to influence—one can’t assume that the students’ own prescriptions for improving college will be correct. Freshmen don’t realize, for instance, that the dorms they may least prefer (long institutional hallways, shared bathrooms, multiple roommates) may in fact be the most helpful in their own search for friends on campus. They don’t realize that in calling for “smaller classes” they are in fact calling for limits to their own chances of getting into those classes. In opting for double majors, they may not see that later options will thus become closed to them. In Richard Light’s groundbreaking book about education at Harvard, Making the Most of College, students said that some of their most valuable courses were in foreign languages, but it doesn’t follow that colleges should just require that students take more language courses. Instead, scholars need to discover why such classes are valuable—they must discover how college works—and then see whether that understanding can be applied more broadly.

The Beginnings of an Answer

Students in college face a roughly chronological sequence of predictable major challenges, named in our chapter titles. First, they must successfully enter the social world of college, most importantly by finding friends. Failing that, little else matters. Then they must make academic choices—what courses to take, what major to declare, and which professors to study with, ask advice of, and get help from. A bit later, after settling in with a group of friends, students gain from establishing broader networks that connect them to the opportunities available in the college community generally. Throughout those years, they try to master the various academic learning tasks in their program. Finally, they consolidate whatever gains they’ve made in their college years, and prepare to move on. In the following chapters we describe how students handle these challenges and how the college’s own practices help or hinder them.

More striking to us, though, was one particular detail of how students mastered these challenges—one detail, we might say, of how college actually works in helping students succeed. Time after time, in descriptions of a wide variety of situations, students told us of how encounters with the right person could make a decisive difference in their college careers. At orientation, Maudie, who planned to major in psychology, happened to meet a nice professor in the Chinese Department; within two years Maudie was living and studying full time in Beijing. When George arrived, he was assigned to a “quad” with three roommates—who became three of his best friends. In his freshman dorm Dan met a nice young woman, a tutor in the college’s Writing Center, who taught him the basics of good composition, which he had never learned in high school. John was a football player, but when he joined an a cappella group, it opened new networks and then new opportunities in musical theatre. Hannah met a helpful philosophy professor who became acquainted with her interests, and then directed her to yet another professor in anthropology, where she found a wonderful academic home. When Claire almost accidentally stumbled into an art history class with Professor Swanson, she “was hooked” and quickly shifted her scheduling and her major. Time and again, a single dinner at a professor’s home, or a single focused conversation with a professor about the student’s work, seemed to have an outsized impact on the student’s success—for very little effort by the professor. Human contact, especially face to face, seems to have an unusual influence on what students choose to do, on the directions their careers take, and on their experience of college.² It has leverage, producing positive results far beyond the effort put into it.

More generally, person-to-person relationships are fundamental at every stage—before, during, and after the core learning activities of college:

1. Satisfactory personal relationships are a prerequisite for learning. Only by having friends will students “buy into” the college experience at all, and devote the time and effort to learning. Students who fail to find friends, or at least workable substitutes, are likely to drop out of college, if not officially then at least emotionally. As Vincent Tinto has argued, student persistence in college “entails the incorporation, that is integration, of the individual as a competent member in the social and intellectual (academic) communities of the college.”³

2. Personal connections are often the central mechanism and daily motivators of the student experience. A respected teacher who invites students into her home can become a role model for intellectual life; friends who study seriously increase one’s own time studying; intense arguments with dormmates often provide the most salient moral education. When their friends go abroad, students are more likely to do so; when a professor sits down for a one-on-one writing conference, the student will concentrate more on her writing.⁴ Faculty-student interactions both inside and outside the classroom have dramatic effects on student learning.⁵ Students’ motivation is dramatically variable, even within a single course,⁶ and that motivation often depends on connections to other people. (Of course, “peer effects” are not always positive: peers can increase binge drinking,⁷ and some evidence suggests that participating in Greek-letter organizations can hurt academic work.)⁸ Especially at crucial turning points, we found, face-to-face interactions can be decisive, for good or ill. Peers seem to especially matter when they coalesce into what we call “microcommunities,” organized around their own values, meeting regularly, and providing networks to other friends and acquaintances.

3. Finally, for countless students, long-lasting friendships with fellow students and sometimes teachers are a major result of the college experience. Alumni frequently told us that friendships were the most valuable result of their undergraduate years, overshadowing even treasured academic gains. It’s well known, too, that college can be a fabulous marriage market.⁹ A closeness to others unmatched in later life; relationships that last a lifetime; a network of friends called on in time of need, as well as the extended network of alumni helpful in job searches—all of these can infuse the undergraduate experience with emotional significance and depth, beyond even the acquisition of important technical skills.

This pervasive influence of relationships suggests that a college—at least insofar as it offers real benefits—is less a collection of programs than a gathering of people. Programs matter, to be sure. Certainly, to learn physics properly one must at some point study electricity and magnetism, and every university needs departments of literature and mathematics. At colleges like St. John’s, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, well-designed core curricula that are supported by the senior faculty reliably offer serious undergraduate educations. Excellent curricula and imaginative programs can attract better students and professors—that is, the right people. And some programs are so central to a specific institution that they are arguably inseparable from the faculty itself. Some programs at the college worked quite well indeed: a nationally recognized college-wide writing program; a wildly popular preorientation outdoor leadership program; and a perennially strong choral music program, for instance. All had strong and committed leadership, all easily meshed with the long-standing culture of the college, and all brought people together in time and space in ways that tapped, and then cultivated, already-existing student motivation. Regardless, all such curricula are difficult to design, organize, and maintain; their results are often uncertain; and in every case, they depend for success on the quality of the personnel committed to them. Curriculum is nice, but may not be fundamental for a good college. But good people, brought together in the right ways, we suspect are both necessary and perhaps even sufficient to create a good college.

The people (friends, acquaintances, teachers, staff) whom a student encounters matter more than the programs because the people are alive—or more precisely, because they can instantaneously adjust to the shifting needs and interests of their fellow creatures, the students. Most college students are not relentlessly focused on a single goal, nor is a good college a single-purpose factory that churns out one clearly defined product. More like a church or even a family, a college serves multiple interests which are constantly shifting, even for those individual students. Thoughtful teachers and administrators know that. Yes, the students we studied gained academic skills (see Chapter 6) such as writing, speaking, data analysis, and critical thinking, as well as the specialized knowledge and techniques of various disciplines. But they also realized other gains, which they often considered more important: finding friends, mentors, or life partners; dramatically improving their confidence in facing challenges; even gaining an eagerness to try new things and to enter adult life with optimism. For some students, the four years’ experience in itself, even apart from any later payoffs, was worth the time and expense. Therefore, getting the right people together at the right time is the single best thing that leaders can do. In our research, students who were somewhat opportunistic in their goals, who shifted their efforts according to what they found available (better teachers, more engaged fellow students, new activities) were regularly more satisfied overall, and at least in that sense more successful in college. Having helpful people (teachers, friends) readily available makes all these gains possible.

Criteria for Recommendations

So how might that be achieved? Leaders at all levels who want to help students are stopped by a host of obstacles and shortages: political opposition, competing priorities, lack of money or personnel, or just a shortage of their own energy. What they need are workable solutions, not utopian visions, expensive new initiatives, piles of additional work, or huge fights with the faculty. Throughout this book we try to develop recommendations, presented in full in Chapter 8, on which leaders can readily act with a good chance of success. Because our goal is to realistically maximize those odds—that is, for improvements that might actually come about—we used four criteria in developing recommended actions:

1. They should be effective, as shown by research; they should demonstrably and reliably produce substantial benefits, so that effort spent in pursuing them is not wasted.

2. They should be highly leveraged, so a small effort produces disproportionately positive results; payoffs should be quick, so as to reinforce the parties involved. That way, at least ideally, efforts become self-sustaining and don’t require ongoing work.

3. They should be at least close to resource neutral, not requiring major new infusions of money, time, or people. Few institutions these days have extra resources just lying around.

4. They should be widely available, so that the full range of leaders can use at least some of them. No one should have to wait on a president’s approval, or a vote of the faculty, or the completion of new buildings, to start acting.

These criteria are rigorous. They quickly exclude a host of popular and potentially good ideas whose value seems well established. Student research or senior projects, for instance, which we agree provide major benefits, are at the same time quite expensive, especially in terms of faculty time. Freshman seminars as well entail both obvious and hidden costs that may not be justified by the gains (see Chapter 4). Calls for reconfiguring the entire professoriate to “be more student friendly,” or to adopt new pedagogical methods, or to absorb the latest research in the neuroscience of learning, sound good, but are unlikely to bear fruit because they would require dramatic changes in the work habits of many people. Curricular reform and strategic planning, perennial fillers of faculty calendars, require huge time investments, often with too little to show in positive results. Online courses obviously increase access to some version of college, but the corresponding loss of face-to-face contact could prove damaging to students’ motivation. Finally, at the national level, the universal adoption, under federal and accreditor duress, of sweeping assessment reforms over the past decade has entailed tremendous labor costs with little actual evidence of improvement to collegiate education. All such efforts have their partisans, but few reliably deliver benefits to students.

Reforms are often praised precisely for being big and dramatic rather than for being small and effective. After all, it’s more fun to talk about Big Solutions. In this book, by contrast, we want to find the smallest possible solutions yielding the greatest possible impact. We think the power of personal contact may be the key element in such solutions.

The College

In our research we closely studied students at a single institution—Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. We are fully aware of the advantages and drawbacks of such “case study” research. One advantage is obvious: Hamilton is our own college, so we know it intimately. Dan has taught there since 1981 and Chris was an undergraduate between 2001 and 2005. Located at roughly the geographic center of New York State, Clinton is rural, bucolic, somewhat isolated, and—importantly for campus life—in the center of New York’s “snow belt”; the area averages about 100 inches of snowfall each year. Chartered in 1812, in many respects Hamilton (we’ll call it “the college”) is a stereotypical New England liberal arts college. Just over 1,800 students are enrolled, 53 percent women and 47 percent men. Set in a beautiful 1,350-acre campus atop a wooded hill, the college is expensive (over $53,000 in comprehensive fees in 2011–2012), with lavish facilities. A well-paid faculty of over 180 full-time professors, plus part-timers and adjuncts, gives it a nine-to-one student-faculty ratio. Its endowment in the early 2000s stood near three-quarters of a billion dollars, and the percentage of its 20,000 alumni donating in a given year put it in the top 1 percent of all higher education institutions in the country. In the years of our research the acceptance rate ranged closely around 30 percent, while around 50 percent of students received financial aid, including grants, loans, or work. SAT score submission was optional, but at a minimum, one-third of each entering class had scores between 650 and 740. (In other words, the students aren’t in the nation’s very top tier, but they’re close.) Around one-fifth of enrolled students were multicultural.

Overall, then, the college is small, rich, and selective. It’s also secular, undergraduate only, teaching-centered, and—unusual even for small liberal arts colleges—lacking the stan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. The Search for a Solution
• 2. Entering
• 3. Choosing
• 4. The Arithmetic of Engagement
• 5. Belonging
• 6. Learning
• 7. Finishing
• 8. Lessons Learned
• Appendix: Methods
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index