Posted by AdminLinkEd

May 13, 2009, 11:13 am

By now (it’s May) students applying to college have heard yea or nay from admissions offices, made choices about where they’ll attend school next year, and maybe even made them again, as spots on waiting lists have opened up.  I’d be really curious to know what factors were the most important in their decisions.  Was it the financial package?  The institution’s academic profile?  The range of majors offered, the possibility for independent study, its study abroad program?  The co-curriculum?  Getting away from family and friends?  Staying near them?  Something else? 

So many things can go into this decision.  If people are lucky, they’ll get the funding they need, be able to choose the kind of institution that suits them best—large university or small college, urban or rural setting, and so on.  In other words, they’ll find the right fit.  And if different options seem appealing, maybe they’ll be helped by the increasing resources available for understanding what different institutions have to offer.  There are a number of terrific websites for identifying possible matches for your interests based on an institution’s size, location, departmental makeup, affordability and more:  the College Board  website and the Department of Education’s College Navigator () offer information on the full range of US institutions of higher education; U-CAN (the University and College Accountability Network) makes available a wealth of information about many private colleges and the VSA (Voluntary System of Accountability)  focuses attention on public institutions.  I find myself particularly interested in the VSA because of its still somewhat unusual attention not only to the kinds of things I noted above, but to students’ learning gains in the key areas of writing, critical thinking and analytical reasoning, all of which are—we know—important not only to success in college but to success after college as well.   A similarly valuable source of information is the NSSE / USA Today database, which makes available key data from the National Survey of Student Engagement,” an instrument that measures “student involvement in key practices associated with learning, persistence, and graduation” (for more on NSSE go to and for the database see). 

These are all valuable resources, but once the decisions are made and students find themselves at their institutions, what’s going to matter most at that point?  I can offer a little perspective on this question if I think like the professor that I once was.  I know that good advising—about how to navigate a varied curriculum, how to choose a major, and so on—will make a difference; that participating in class, meeting with professors to talk about the work you are doing, and devoting serious time to reading, thinking and writing will do a lot to ensure a successful academic career; that a life that balances classroom work with life outside the classroom makes a lot of sense.  There’s more to it, though, and I’ve been feeling a little too distant from the reality of being a student on a college campus today to know exactly what.  And so I asked a friend of mine, who just last week finished up a very successful first year of college:  what’s the one thing you would tell people starting college next year?  After all it took to get to college—all the hard work in high school, all the research, the reading, the testing, the visits (virtual and actual), the thinking, not to mention putting together the finances and working out all the other practical details that go into getting yourself there—what next?  And she said this:  “put yourself out there … take risks, do things you've never done before.”  That’s great advice and it brought home to me a point that I don’t remember enough: that my only regrets about college (and maybe about things too) stem from those times when I didn’t stretch, didn’t take chances, stayed with what was safe and predictable.  So take her advice.  Go for it.  And if you have the time and the inclination, let me know how it turns out.

Donna Heiland
Vice President / Teagle Foundation
May 11, 2009

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