Good relationships -- friendships especially, but also connections with teachers -- are a necessity for traditional-aged (18-22 or so) students at a residential college or university. Without friends, a student will never become engaged with the institution, and so will never get excited about the opportunities that college offers, intellectually or socially. They'll probably drop out; even if they stay, they'll give up psychologically. Similarly, if a student never encounters a good teacher, academic work isn't going to happen. But if they do find an exciting teacher -- ideally in their first year -- college can become a real adventure, opening all sorts of learning opportunities. So these relationships are necessary.
The interesting twist, we found, is that it doesn't take very much effort: if a student can find a couple of good friends, and even one or two great teachers, they can have a marvelously productive college career. That's all it takes. A very small effort, in this sense, can produce a huge positive result. You don't have to spend more money, or work real hard, or "change everything." You just need to be a little bit deliberate, early on, in finding good friends and good teachers. Then the other stuff mostly takes care of itself.
"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. It has leverage, producing positive results far beyond the effort put into it." ---excerpt from How College Works
JB: These findings are major, Dan. This means, in a sense, that schools that are less well-endowed are not necessarily at a disadvantage when it comes to providing a meaningful and productive college experience. Did this cause a stir? What kind of reaction have you gotten?
DC: I think that's right -- less wealthy schools can, in fact, accomplish a great deal, at least as far as actually helping students improve their own skills, confidence, networks, and so on. And I think, for instance, that certain community colleges have proven to be exceptionally helpful to their students, with minimal resources -- just think what they could do with adequate funding! And the elite liberal arts colleges certainly get great results in our terms -- but they are often expensive, which obviously creates access problems.
Unfortunately, some of the prominent ranking systems routinely privilege a college's wealth, by measuring "inputs" -- i.e., what kinds of resources they have, not so much how well those resources are used. Those rankings encourage colleges to raise and spend lots of money -- not to be particularly efficient with what they have. That's part of the reason colleges are so expensive, I think: rankings encourage colleges to spend money.
The reactions to our findings vary quite a bit. Some folks (parents, especially) love this work, I think because it puts the student's actual experience right at the center of what matters. We say that that results -- of all sorts, not narrowly defined -- for students should be the measure of a college's success. In that sense, student affairs professionals are also quite sympathetic.
Faculties are often skeptical of our work, probably because we emphasize that students are not just academic creatures, but legitimately need a decent social life too. And some professors see their own discipline as uniquely valuable. That makes sense -- they are "professors", they're supposed to profess a discipline -- but is rather unrealistic if you think of the students' lives. I personally love teaching sociology, but my classes are really just a small piece of my students' college education.
At the same time, some professors have been delighted to hear how even a small bit of effort on their part, applied in the right way, can dramatically affect a student's motivation and learning. In a sense, we're telling them how to get better results with less work.
JB: When I heard you speak last week, you walked us through how a student's living space has such an impact on his/her college experiences. I had never really thought about this before and found it fascinating. Can you share this with our readers?
DC: Sure. Somewhere in our second or third year of interviewing students, we began to notice that in talking about finding friends, sophomores and juniors would often refer back to freshman year and talk about the great friends they made in their dormitories -- but only certain dorms seemed to be the unusually fertile locations for friendships. [Check this out.]
Oddly enough, those dorms -- "residence halls," if you want to be up-to-date -- were often rather unpopular with students: old-fashioned, long hallways, shared bathrooms, lots of crowding. "A zoo," or "a dump," some students would even call them. In probing further, we discovered that those very features -- the crowding, the shared spaces -- were exactly what forced incoming students to meet a lot of peers, and get to know them reasonably well. They hardly had a choice, in fact, so even the timid students found it easy to make friends in these settings.
And of course, during the first year, and especially first semester, of college many students are unusually open to making new friends; it's an almost unique time of life in that respect. So a crowded dorm, with densely-populated common areas, that houses lots of first-year students is going be an amazing place to meet people. Works like a charm. And again, it works especially well for introverts.
The only problem is that incoming students think they won't want to live there -- but they don't understand the benefits.
Dorms like that are a great example of what we call "high-contact" spaces, where a student will necessarily see between 20 and 80 people several times a week, like it or not. Those numbers are big enough you can always find a friend, but small enough that you get to know lots of candidates. Other examples would be a good-sized sports team, or a choir, or certain extracurriculars. Greek-letter societies work, too, but we found that sometimes their members become a bit isolated from the rest of the campus, which creates other problems.
After the first year, once a student has some friends, where they live is less decisive, although it remains a powerful influence. For better or worse, we're all affected deeply by the people we spend time with, and being physically nearby is a big part of that. In fact, that's a major advantage of a selective college: you're living close to lots of other smart, serious people; you'll get to know and work with them.
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