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How college works
Constrained 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 limited resources need not diminish the undergraduate experience.How College Worksreveals the decisive role that personal relationships play in determining a student's success, and puts forward a set of small, inexpensive interventions that yield substantial improvements in educational outcomes. At a liberal arts college in New York, the authors followed nearly one hundred students over eight years. The curricular and technological innovations beloved by administrators mattered much less than did professors and peers, especially early on. At every turning point in undergraduate lives, it was the people, not the programs, that proved critical. Great teachers were more important than the topics studied, and just two or three good friendships made a significant difference academically as well as socially. For most students, college works best when it provides the daily motivation to learn, not just access to information. Improving higher education means focusing on the quality of relationships with mentors and classmates, for when students form the right bonds, they make the most of their education.
eBook
How College Works
A Chronicle of Higher Education \"Top 10 Books on Teaching\" Selection
Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize
Constrained 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
eBook
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
Book Chapter
Belonging
By the middle of sophomore year, almost all students at the collegebelong. They have publicly committed themselves by declaring a major, by choosing or refusing roommates, by selecting a faculty advisor, by sticking with or quitting a sports team, and by joining, leading, or leaving a number of extracurricular activities. Some students are members of the campus “alternative” crowd: living in a co-op dorm, eating on the vegetarian meal plan, maybe studying photography or art.¹ Others are sorority officers, maybe planning to study abroad in Italy while majoring in art history. Some like Joe, quoted above, are deeply immersed
Book Chapter
Finishing
For students at the college, senior year is a time of pride and fear—pride at having surmounted the challenges and learned so much; fear at the approaching end of this phase of one’s life, and of being forced (unless graduate school intervenes) to finally face the “real world” with its shocking shortage of safety nets. It’s a time of transition, a bit like when they first came to college, of leaving one world and entering another. It’s also a time for summing up, for realizing what one has gained.
Their immediate challenge is to remain fully engaged in the
Book Chapter
Choosing
In an inescapable irony, college students make the freest yet most consequential decisions of their college careers when they are relatively new, that is, when they least know what they’re doing. We’ve already seen that incoming freshmen face the initial challenge of successfully entering the social world of the college. Right away they must find the cafeteria, meet some peers, share space with roommates, pick some courses to take, join a club or two, and—within weeks—probably wash their own clothes, perhaps for the first time in their lives. At many schools they also find an apartment, declare a
Book Chapter
The Arithmetic of Engagement
Letʹs stop for a moment at this halfway point in our narrative. Until now we’ve looked at students’ experiences, and we’ve seen that apparently small factors or even chance can sometimes lead to very important outcomes; that apparently minor decisions can often have major results; and that teachers matter, not only by inspiring students but sometimes, unfortunately, by discouraging them as well. We’ve also seen that what students want is sometimes not what they actually need, even to satisfy their own immediate wishes: unattractive “high-contact” dorms can help to produce the friendships that students most require for success in college.
Book Chapter
Entering
ʺGoing to collegeʺ means more than enrolling in courses and pursuing a degree. For traditional-age students at a residential college, it also means entering a new community, stepping into the exhilarating but sometimes frightening world of incipient adulthood.¹ When students successfully enter this community of young adults, it can—potentially—energize and motivate them for learning, for excelling at athletics, for socializing (yes—for partying, drinking, hooking up), for giving tremendous loyalty to the institution, for pursuing careers, and sometimes even for becoming, as the cliché has it, “lifelong learners.” When they don’t successfully enter socially or academically, students often
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