Abstract
Winner of a prize from Harvard University Press, identified by The Chronicle of Higher Education as a top ten book on college teaching and, as of this writing, the top seller in Amazon’s offerings on higher education administration, How College Works rings true. It proclaims a powerful finding about students to administrators who worry about budgets and faculty who worry about publications. To invoke the title of a 1952 book on European shtetls: Life is with People.
Using eleven years of methodologically inventive data, Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs trace how students experience college from their first day on campus through their recollections as alumni. Their top finding: people matter. From feeling as though they belong on campus to choosing a major, people permeate the daily lives of contented students. If they have a group of friends (two or three will suffice), they are more likely not to transfer and to graduate. Also, they are more likely to take courses in a discipline if during their first or second year, they have been fortunate enough to be enrolled in a class with an outstanding teacher—even better a professor who knows their name and is available for one-on-one discussions. Students care about classes whose instructors care about them. Even professors in large classes may qualify if they demonstrate that they care about the students. Teachers who invite small classes to their homes provide a highlight in an educational career.
The goals of Chambliss and Takacs’ case study of Hamilton College are to discover the mechanisms or social processes “that lead students down or away from certain pathways and . . . to determine how these processes might be leveraged to improve college education” (p. 9), because for individual students a path, once taken, is difficult to change. Take the key matter of making friends. Newly arrived students are more likely to succeed under some conditions than others. They will meet more people if they live on a dormitory floor where everyone uses one large bathroom and if they keep the door to their room open than if they share a suite (including bathroom) with a few people. As newcomers, they will be more likely to meet potential friends if they take large classes, engage in activities that attract a variety of people, and join clubs such as a chorus, whose members major in a variety of fields. These choices matter, because as time progresses from orientation week through graduation, a student has fewer and fewer options. The first week of school everyone is looking to make friends; but once people have joined a group, they are less likely to be open to converting acquaintances into friendships. For instance, members of a fraternity or of an athletic team are not likely to make friends with acquaintances who live in the dorms or do not play sports.
The authors summarize their findings with ten basic principles. To paraphrase, (1) college is a chronological experience, and mastering one challenge depends upon having mastered previous ones. (2) Relationships are central to the college experience. (3) Students enter and follow readily available pathways, which limit their subsequent experiences. (4) They often make decisions opportunistically. Minor contingencies, such as the availability of courses, may shape major decisions, such as selecting a major. (5) A college makes some pathways more easily available than others. (6) Possibilities are limited, because resources are finite. (Not everyone is a great teacher.) (7) Feeling that they belong motivates students to explore options. (8) Early events and choices set subsequent possibilities. (9) College provides “a wide variety of benefits” besides classes. (10) “Isolated from the people who carry them out, programs, practices, and pedagogies seem to have little impact” (p. 157).
These principles imply a series of inexpensive practices that may “improve” students’ experiences. They seem to be common sense, but are often ignored. To wit: the people who are best at lecturing to large classes should teach them. Use architecture (“space”) to help people meet one another. Put your best teachers and most popular courses in favorable time slots so that students can find them. Providing lots of small classes may not contribute to the student experience, if the professors are boring.
This is the second book I have read about Hamilton College. (The other is Mitchell Stevens’ Creating a Class [2007] which received the Pierre Bourdieu Award of the Education Section of the American Sociological Association.) I have also read several of anthropologist Bonnie Urciuoli’s articles about ethnicity and race at Hamilton; they are more sympathetic to recent studies about the corporatization of higher education. Creating a Class and How College Works seem indifferent to that sort of analysis. Ultimately, though, macro-structural elements are relevant to how we use these studies.
It is difficult for those of us who as students lived on campus or in an off-campus college enclave to remember that we are the minority. All of the authors of work about Hamilton College remind readers that the school is highly selective, private not-for-profit, and even elite. Dan Chambliss mentions a large class of 85 students. At many universities, a large class means well over 300 students, even 500 seated in two different lecture halls and some watching the class on television. But we are also the minority in other ways. Today more undergraduates attend for-profit than not-for-profit institutions of higher education. If making friends and talking to teachers are so important to educational motivation, what drives successful online students? How would one improve the experience of students at for-profit colleges, when most of them have full-time jobs and family responsibilities? What makes the part-timers at community colleges succeed?
How College Works is a valuable book, but we also need to know more about what is today the (modal) typical student: the black or Latina woman who takes classes part-time from a for-profit college, especially when she also has a relatively low-wage job and children.