Interview

(Note: I wrote this interview myself, but feel free to submit other questions and I will add them.)

Q: What inspired you to write the book?

A: A few years ago, I was an undergraduate advisor in my department which meant that I would both enroll new majors and help seniors determine if they had the credits to graduate. I liked to quiz the graduating seniors about their experience with the major and I started to learn some disturbing things - that most hadn't really gotten to know any of their professors, engaged in research or complex problem-solving exercises, or could really say what they had learned over the course of 10 or so classes in political science. A number of them asked me for letters of recommendation even though I could barely recall them from the large-lecture course they took from me. I also found out that the majority didn't really understand how either my department or the university worked - what sort of opportunities it offered and what sort of obstacles it presented. I felt bad about this because many of these students were quite smart and ambitious and would have liked to have had a better educational experience, but somehow never figured out how to do so.

I started to develop the advice here so that I could tell incoming students how to avoid these problems and get the most out of the major. The economist Tyler Cowen says that any book should possess the quality that if everyone read it and was persuaded by it, the world would be changed for the better. I hope to have achieved that.

I had initially envisioned maybe 10 or so pieces of advice plus a brief description of how universities work to put the advice in context. I thought that it might take 10-20 pages and I had some free time because it was summer and I had just submitted a book manuscript. I thought it might be something useful that I could post on my website. Somehow it then spiralled out of control until it became what you see now.

Q: The book contains seventy-five tips for getting a better education. If you had to pick out the most important ones, which ones would they be?

A: I think there are three guiding principles that animate most of the advice. The big one is to seek out personal contact with faculty. Universities can be fairly impersonal and it is fairly easy to become a face in the crowd just by going with the flow. You need to be pro-active to get faculty to take you and your ideas seriously. I say that my ideal is a professor on one of a log and a student on the other (this was the emblem of my undergraduate college). No college offers this much contact, but there are ways to get close to it that I describe in the book.

A second principle is to challenge yourself - take hard courses, choose harder majors, try to construct your own course of study, definitely enroll in honors programs or write a senior thesis. A bonus is that by doing these things, you are also likely to get more attention from faculty. The third principle is to try new things, both things that you don't know anything about and also things that you know you will disagree with. You want someone to challenge your hidden preconceptions and biases. That's the only path to the truth.

If I had to choose a handful of actual tips to emphasize, they would be these:

Tip 14: Take Classes with Heavy Writing Requirements

Tip 17: Focus More on Methods than Topics

Tip 40: Choose More Structured Majors

Tip 43: Write a Senior Thesis

Tip 55: Visit the Office Hours of All Your Professors at Least Once

Tip 64: Read Academic Blogs

Q: How did you come up with the pieces of advice? What sort of research did you do?

A: As I mention in the book, I'm not an education scholar. I'm a political scientist and so the book isn't the product of original research on my part like, say, Richard Light's excellent book Making the Most of College which describes the results of a survey he conducted of graduating seniors. I think there are two or three main sources for the book. One is the common knowledge of professors. We have a good idea of how universities work and what is worthwhile and not worthwhile in them. For some reason a lot of this knowledge just hasn't been written down systematically. Some professors do impart it to their students, but not all do whether out of laziness or embarrassment or lack of interest on the part of most students.

Once I started summarizing this common knowledge, I began to discover a decent-sized literature in education and economics (as well as by former university presidents) on what works and doesn't work at college. If you want to be overwhelmed some day, pick up Pascarella and Terenzini's How College Affects Students which is a thousand or so page summary of what we know and don't know about what college does. I wouldn't say that I have become an expert on this research, but I have picked up some of the latest results that seemed to me most persuasive and weren't yet common knowledge. And finally, there might be some specks of originality in the book, things that I came up with myself after thinking about how universities work. I think the real contribution though is more the systematizing of what we know and putting it in digestible form rather than adding something new.

Q: There are a lot of college guides on the market. How is yours different?

A: I think there are two major differences. One is that I focus mostly on learning. I assume that my readers want to learn more and I show them how to do this. Most of the guide is based on improving the student-professor relationship, though I also consider ways of learning outside the classroom. Other guides I think give you a lot of information about college outside the classroom – there is a lot about choosing a college (which ignores the enormous similarities between colleges) and then orienting yourself socially (making friends, dealing with your roommate, going to parties). Where other guides focus on the classroom it is mostly about how to achieve some sort of external success as measured by grades. In my view, grades are overrated so to speak; the real key is what you learn how to do which is the emphasis of my book. I wouldn't even know what to say about having a better social life; like most professors, mine was pretty pathetic.

I also hope the guide doesn't talk down to students. Charles McGrath recently reviewed a number of new guides to college in the New York Times and noted that "The books tend to be written in perky, soundbite prose that aspires to the condition of video and assumes a reader in need of handholding." I've tried to avoid this and assume that the readers are intelligent adults. It shouldn't be a slog though. There should be plenty to laugh at, particularly if you read the footnotes.

Q: The book is somewhat critical of universities. What would you change to make them better?

I like to think of it as critical but understanding. I really do believe in the ideal of the modern research university - the idea that the university should be generating new ideas that aren't readily marketable, that this makes the world a better place. And I believe that this ideal helps their educational mission as well. It is hard to teach well without knowing a lot about a subject which typically requires doing original research. Too many professors are teaching things that aren’t true because they don’t follow the field very closely. (This is particularly true in fields like my own where there is not a large body of accepted theory.) Yes, there are tradeoffs when professors devote more attention to their research than teaching because it leads to greater rewards. But the problems are on the margin with the incentives being slightly too skewed towards research. I wouldn't want to radically reorganize the university, only strengthen a few incentives and reduce some others.

For example, the economist James Miller has proposed that graduating seniors be given $1000 to allocate among professors of their choosing and that this money replace merit raises decided by deans and department chairs. Professors respond to incentives and if there were greater incentives to be good teachers, they would respond. Despite the manifest problems of the US News ratings of colleges, they are right that someone should be measuring how well universities are doing their job. (I personally think that the Washington Monthly does a better job at this than US News) There should be more effort in documenting what students learn at different universities and how well professors are teaching. Then students could better act as informed consumers. Finally, I'd like to see more research on what is pedagogically effective at the university level and more mandatory training of professors in the best methods of teaching.

I would add that I think universities are moving in the right direction. Students are getting more personal attention and better teaching than in the past. Recently I was amazed to see Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason, write that “At GMU some of our best teachers are being recruited by other universities with very attractive offers and some of our most highly placed students have earned their positions through excellence in teaching rather than through the more traditional route of research. I do not think GMU is unique in this regard – my anecdotal evidence is that the market for professors is rewarding great teachers with higher wages and higher placements than in earlier years.” Maybe things are changing faster than I had realized.

Q: Given these obstacles, is a university education worthwhile?

The economists say that it is surely worth the cost financially. College graduates earn lots more than non-graduates. The open question is whether this is due to what they learn in college or to the fact that college simply performs a credentialing function. It certifies that you are smart or hardworking, but doesn't actually change you in substantial ways. Brian Hanson and Bryan Caplan of George Mason have been strong advocates of this view on their blogs.

I wouldn’t rule this explanation out for many students, but I would say that you can get a great education at most colleges and universities if you want it (for example, if you follow the rules in my book). I’m not sure what percentage of students are getting this kind education; I would guesstimate that it is maybe 10-15%. For me it is a constant joy to be around so many smart people who work on such diverse and fascinating topics and I learn from them all the time. (I wish I could still be taking classes.) I tend to assume that many students share this joy, but I may be wrong. In short, if you want to learn at universities, you surely can.

Q: You note in the book that you yourself made some mistakes in college. What was your own college experience like?

I was pretty lucky that I got to attend a prestigious liberal arts college (Williams College) where almost all my classes were small seminars and I got to know a good number of my professors personally (or at least had the opportunity to). What I regret is not challenging myself enough, not pursuing independent research in the form of a senior thesis, not investigating more new subjects, not getting to know more interesting people, not trying to learn more specific skills, not pursuing study abroad, and wasting a quarter of my education on pre-med courses. That said, I think the education I got served me well in opening my mind to new ideas.