An Excellent Book on Getting a College Education You Won’t Read

Welcome to my review of Prof. Andrew Roberts’s excellent book, The Thinking Student’s Guide to College: 75 Tips for Getting a Better Education. Calmly, sanely, and intelligently, Prof. Roberts dissects the various elements of choosing a college, choosing your classes once you’re there, how to interact with professors, learning outside the classroom, and then going to graduate school. Here you will find no breathless descriptions of residence halls, no hints on positioning yourself for admission to “top” colleges, no guide to the “fast track” to med school or your MBA. Instead you will be beguiled by sober and clearly written ideas related to the collegiate experience. Unfortunately, these very wonderful qualities will make it a book loved only by those of us who would like to see our students fully engaged in their academic work, striving to become mature, thoughtful adults who might have a shot at running the world properly.

Prof. Roberts is an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. He has also written a book entitled The Quality of Democracy in Eastern Europe. In other words, he didn’t have to write this book–he’s got two jobs and plenty to think about already, yet he took the time to give us the benefit of his observations in a way that neither insults our intelligence nor talks down to us from the ivory tower. And who’s going to read anything like that?

In a world full of “getting into college” drivel, there’s very little room for the basic message of “work hard, do your best, and think.” People want easy answers, the “secrets” of admission to “prestigious colleges,” and shortcuts that enable students to avoid actually studying. The books range from the particularly egregious, such as What High Schools Don’t Tell You (And Other Parents Don’t Want You to Know): Create a Long-Term Plan for Your 7th to 10th Grader for Getting into the Top Colleges to the bearable, of which there are several, to the very good such as Colleges That Change Lives and College Admissions Together: It Takes a Family.

What sets Roberts’s book apart is that he actually considers a college education, a liberal arts education in particular, as worthwhile in itself: Tip #38 is “Don’t Worry Too Much about the Job Prospects of the Major” will cause most parents, at least, to throw the book down right there (if they manage to get past Tip #1: “You Can Get an Equivalent Classroom Education at Most Reasonably Selective Colleges and Universities.”) The point is to learn things, kids, not simply to credential yourself.

In my six years on the high school side of the college process, I still remember one visiting college representative vividly. He was a PhD student at Cornell, and he spent most of his session with my students talking about the work he was doing and how exciting it was to have the resources of a major university at his disposal. He didn’t talk about social life or residence halls or how to get to med school in three years; he communicated the pleasures of the life of the mind. In the same vein, Tip #14 is “Take Classes with Heavy Writing Requirements,” the first two sentences of which are, “While college is not primarily a place to learn practical skills, there is at least one skill that you need to pick up as part of your education. That is the skill to write quickly and well.” It’s not for nothing that Tips #69-75 are about graduate school, not jobs.

Although the book is mostly about how to behave in college, early chapters touch on what colleges want and how to choose one. Although the standard answer to the former (which a lot like Freud’s remark about women) is “a well-rounded class,” Roberts’s answer is more unconventional. He writes,

The one aim that drives most colleges and universities,…, 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 as they can. To put it bluntly, everyone wants to be Harvard, and Harvard wants to make sure that no one else is Harvard.

Suddenly the groves of academe look more like a gym full of ninth graders at their new high school. Basically, it’s not about you, college applicant. That in itself makes this book required reading.

Following soon after this takedown are several tips that smooth over the usual panicky bunk about micro-researching everything to come to the perfect “fit.” Even as someone who advocates the “match/fit” idea to a great extent, I appreciate Tip #9: “Don’t Worry; Most Students Are Happy with Their Choice.” Heresy! And yet most students really are happy after a few weeks at their college, even if it wasn’t their first choice. (One college recently did a survey of incoming freshmen, the majority of whom said it was NOT their first choice. Surveyed again at the end of their freshman year, a majority said it WAS their first choice.) Rather sweetly, Prof. Roberts writes, “I feel a little bad about this tip…While I don’t want to say that your choice of college is insignificant, I do want to take some of the anxiety out of it.”

Well, good luck with that, but it’s really true. Many of us in the college access business (of a certain age, perhaps) joke that we picked our colleges randomly, or nearly so, and we’ve managed fairly well. So while there’s no reason not to do all the research before putting a list together, it’s not a life or death decision, either. And Roberts isn’t just making nice; he means what he says:

Within a few weeks of showing up at a college, any college, you will learn a whole new way of living…You will not only learn a new way of life, but you will identify with it. You will wear sweatshirts with your college’s insignia, root for your football team, and defend your college against its rivals. In short, you will feel that you belong there. And this applies to just about any college you choose. In a New York Times survey of recent college graduates, 54 percent viewed their undergraduate experience as excellent, 39 percent as good, and only 7 percent as fair or poor.

I’ve had students (and parents, for that matter) sit on my sofa and weep because they can’t decide between Tufts and Brown or because they might have to choose one of several excellent non-Ivy League colleges. My counselor self is making sympathetic noises but in my head I’m thinking, “Boo-hoo! Just pick one!” If we were to adopt Prof. Roberts’ outlook, a whole industry would topple–in the long run, most people turn out just fine.

And that, of course, is why this admirable book is doomed to be unread. It’s too hard to accept many of its rules and observations and too much in it challenges the reader’s need to panic about getting into college and the colleges’ pleasantly constructed view of life once there. It advises the reader to “Write a Senior Thesis” (#43) and to “Learn the Rules of Critical Thinking and Apply Them Constantly” (#50). Seriously?? Well, yes. (In the immortal words of Monty Python, “My brain hurts!”)

The Thinking Student’s Guide to College strips away the blather of most pre-college admission books and gently takes us beyond the viewbook images of effortless existence in a sylvan glade. College is work, really, terrific work that expands your mind and puts you in touch with all kinds of greatness, but only if you let it. Andrew Roberts’ 75 Tips can help you get there. But, aside from my colleagues, you probably won’t read it, will you?