Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew Robertsis assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University and fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. He is the author of The Quality of Democracy in Eastern Europe: Public Preferences and Policy Reforms.

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The Thinking Student's Guide to College

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Introduction.........................................................11 How Universities Work..............................................82 Choosing a College.................................................223 Choosing Classes...................................................454 Choosing a Major...................................................785 Being Successful...................................................956 Interacting with Professors........................................1127 Learning Outside the Classroom.....................................1278 Going to Graduate School...........................................1389 Secrets of the Guild: Rules Professors Live By.....................149ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......................................................163RECOMMENDED READING..................................................165INDEX................................................................167

Chapter One

Soon after arriving on campus, freshmen at my undergraduate college were treated to a lecture by an art historian entitled "A Sense of Where You Are." His talk was about the architectural evolution of the campus and the merits of its various buildings. This chapter tries to do something similar but at a more general level. It explains how modern universities and colleges work-not their physical architecture, but their internal architecture. What they are trying to do-their mission-and how they carry it out. The point of this exercise is to show you what sort of education universities have been designed to provide. The advice throughout this book will make better sense if you understand why I am offering it.

There are over four thousand colleges and universities in the United States, ranging from for-profit, vocational schools that teach their classes online to nonprofit, liberal arts colleges in small New England villages. The description and advice to follow applies to a fraction, but a significant fraction of this group: colleges and universities that try to maintain a national reputation and have faculty who produce at least some research, though many of the factors described apply more broadly. Lest one think this is merely a guidebook to the Ivy League, the advice here should apply to most four-year residential colleges in the United States that admit only a portion of applicants. To put a number on it, the advice should easily fit what the Princeton Review calls the country's 371 best colleges and probably a few hundred more besides. The range is from Harvard to Angelo State, from Stanford to Lourdes.

What Universities Want

What are universities trying to do? To answer this question, you might start with their mission statements. The University of Miami's is "to educate and nurture students, to create knowledge, and to provide service to our community and beyond." But what does this mission imply? It combines teaching, research, and service, three elements present in the mission statements of the sort of colleges described in this book. But how does the university carry them out, and how are they reconciled with each other?

One place to start understanding any organization is the bottom line: where the money comes from and where it goes. But things are not so simple with universities because most of them are nonprofits. They are not simply trying to maximize their profits like Microsoft or General Electric. Any profits they earn have to be reinvested in the university, not distributed to owners or stockholders. So, universities are not out to get rich, or more precisely only wish to get rich to pursue other aims.

What are those other aims? The one aim that drives most colleges and universities, at least those discussed in this book, is a desire to increase their prestige. Universities wish to be viewed as the best in their line of work. They want to achieve the highest esteem among the general public and their peers that they can. To put it bluntly, everyone wants to be Harvard, and Harvard wants to make sure that no one else is Harvard.

Prestige of course is a zero-sum game. Only one university can be the best, only ten can be in the top ten, and so on down the line. If someone moves up, then someone else has to move down. And so competition is fairly merciless.

Now the key question is where prestige comes from. The answer may be a surprise for some readers or immediately obvious to others. Universities and colleges are not viewed as prestigious because they provide the best undergraduate education or because they do the most for their students. Harvard is not Harvard because of what takes place in its classrooms. Truth be told, the classroom experience is more or less a black box for everyone but current students, and even they are in the dark to a certain extent.

Prestige comes, rather, from research. Universities are viewed as prestigious when they have the faculty that is most accomplished in scholarship. The most prestigious universities are the ones who employ the most Nobel Prize winners, the professors with the longest publishing records, and the scholars who are most frequently cited by their colleagues. It is excellence in research that puts Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and all the rest at the top of the heap and Podunk U at the bottom.

The Problem with Teaching

Why is it research excellence rather than teaching excellence that leads to prestige? Shouldn't it be the reverse? One important reason is that skill at teaching undergraduates is difficult to measure and compare. It is hard to determine who does teaching well and to what extent. Students are the main beneficiaries of good teaching, but they are not in a good position to compare universities (being as they attend only one) and are amateurs in the art of evaluation. Even university administrators find it difficult to evaluate their employees on this score since there is no gold standard of teaching, much less an objective way to measure it.

The outcomes of learning are also hard to quantify. There is no test administered to all graduating seniors to determine which universities did the best job educating their students. Career success is one standard, but it has its problems. Are Harvard graduates more successful because they learned more at Harvard or because Harvard was able to recruit the most talented students? As we shall see in the next chapter, it is mainly the latter.

Teaching quality is also less visible to the world at large. Professors, for example, have little idea who among their peers are the best teachers because they don't attend each others' classes or interact with students from other universities. And if professors who work day in and day out at the university don't know this, how are those outside the university supposed to find out? Because the benefits of teaching are felt locally, not globally, it is hard for them to increase a college's prestige. Prestige has to come from a factor that is visible beyond the university campus.

The Importance of Research

Now consider research, the task of coming up with new theories of how the world works. Excellence in research is easy to measure. Not only are there awards (the Nobel Prizes and their equivalents in...