How College Works

 
 
How College Works

by Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs
Harvard University Press

2014

 

 

In my previous life as an adjunct college sociology instructor, one class I was assigned to teach was intended to be a writing-intensive course, but didn't have any specific content requirements. I taught it using books on the sociology of education, intending to help the students understand their own situation better and think reflexively about how what we were learning might apply to their own experiences.

 
If I'd known about How College Works back then, it would have been an excellent addition to the class. I really enjoyed reading it over the last week, and I'd recommend it to anyone I know who still works in higher education.

 
Chambliss and Takacs are writing about the findings of a decade-long research project that intensively studied student learning at a liberal arts college. (Many other researchers participated and published articles from the same project.) Their writing is remarkably clear and well-organized, perhaps because they hope to influence an audience of administrators and trustees.

 
My best summary of Chambliss's findings are that college 'works' by immersing young people in a rich environment of face-to-face interactions at a formative period in their development. To succeed, students must make friends and join the community, find teachers and peers who motivate them to learn, and receive trustworthy advice that helps them navigate through the college bureaucracy. The process is contingent on meeting the 'right people' at the 'right time.' Early successes create more potential for later accomplishments; early difficulties foreclose later opportunities.

 
Students arrive at college with some intrinsic motivation and some idea of their own interests. Without friends and community, they will likely become emotionally detatched and may drop out. Those friends, in turn, help shape their interests, recommending classes, clubs, sports, parties, and other activities, and providing a model for how much to study, how hard to try. Good teachers make students want to learn, and can turn an elective into a major. Bad teachers, or teachers who are a bad fit, can turn students away from entire fields of study, regardless of their earlier plans.

 
Learning happens because students are motivated to show competence and avoid embarrassment in face-to-face setiings with their classmates and teachers. Writing well and public speaking are mostly learned from practice and feedback, and turn out to be among the most valuable skills a student can acquire.
 

Some of the most important insights from this study at first seem counter-intuitive. The dorms students want least (quad rooms, shared bathrooms) expose them to the most new people early on, helping them make friends quickly. Small classes and selective majors may help the students who take them - but the students who don't get in to those still end up somewhere, possibly with a worse experience than they would've had otherwise. And mandatory small seminars result in lots of students getting stuck in a topic they didn't want, because their first choices were all full.

 
Some of the easiest things schools can do to help the most students are to create lots of opportunities to meet others face-to-face, and to identify their most charismatic lecturers and give them large sections at attractive times, to make it easy for more students to get inspired and motivated as early as possible. A little personal attention and mentorship from even one professor can also go a long way. 

 
Online classes mostly do the opposite of what's needed, using up student motivation without giving much in return, rather than increasing it, as face-to-face interactions tend to.