10 Things to Find Out Before Committing to a College

Lynn Jacobs and Jeremy Hyman

US News and World Report, 25 Mar 2009

Often we find that students, and their parents, tend to focus on bells and whistles when making their college selections. They fixate on things like the looks of the campus, the size of the library, the honors and study-abroad programs, even the quality of the football team. Hey, these are all fine and good. But we urge you to also think about some things that, while often overlooked, constitute the bread and butter of your college experience. Before you decide, here are 10 things you might not have thought to consider:

1. The number of requirements . These vary widely from school to school. And while it might look very impressive to see a long list of required courses, it's not so great to find yourself mired in courses that don't interest you, while you're unable to take electives in areas that do. It's even less great when you realize that some of these most unpleasant requirements were instituted by some legislator who insisted that everyone in the state needs to take State History 101. Or by some pushy department in 1950, which couldn't get students to take its courses in any other way.

2. How flexible th os e requirements are . Schools that require specific courses, with no substitutions allowed, can really put you in a bind if you'd rather take more advanced courses—or need to take more remedial courses—to fulfill that requirement. So check to see that the school allows a choice of levels to satisfy the various requirements. Also, keep in mind that anytime a school needs to route hundreds or thousands of students through Course X, Course X is going to become a sort of factory that neither the students taking the course nor the teachers teaching the course are going to like much.

Insider fact: Most professors view teaching these required courses asthe least desirable assignments—since they have to teach everyone who comes into the school—and try to avoid them like the plague.

3. Whether you can get into the classes you want to take . In the past few years, college enrollments have risen but faculty sizes often haven't grown commensurately. This can make for yards-long wait lists for some classes and shortages in first-year classes for students who didn't register on the first possible date.

4-Star Tip. If you're considering a state university in an economically distressed state (Florida, Michigan, and California come to mind), be sure to check the availability of courses before sending in your acceptance.

4. The availability of the major you want to take . Do not assume that the college you are considering actually offers every possible major. Especially if you have a very specialized major in mind, it's critical to check the list of majors at the college (the University of Minnesota, for example, offers 171 majors; nearby Carleton College, 47). Also, check out whether your major is available only by application or to a limited number of students. At certain colleges, some majors are not open to all, especially those that require talent or previous training, like music or art, or those that are extremely popular, like psychology or journalism.

5 . Whether the school has a writing requirement . You might have thought that if the school has a free-standing writing requirement (sometimes called a W course), this is a sign that the school cares about teaching you to write. Au contraire. It's actually quite often a sign that it's not typically expected that professors assign papers in their classes, and that if it were not for the requirement, you might never see a paper in your classes. Since learning to write papers is, in our opinion, one of the most important things you can accomplish in college, consider any writing requirement to be a red flag that the college isn't all too keen on teaching writing.

6. Whether — and how often — graduate stu dents teach their own courses. At many state universities and even some research universities, a significant number of instructors are graduate students. It's important to know how much of your instruction, especially in the first years of college, will be pawned off on them. A class in which a regular professor gives the lectures and the grad students lead discussion sections is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about: Indeed, it's often a good thing to have the material explained from an additional, different perspective. But a real issue arises at schools where grad students are allowed to teach entire courses on their own (that is, where graduate students are the lecturer). Some schools (for example, the University of California and the University of Texas) have policies that grad students who teach their own classes must have completed all the coursework for the Ph.D. and must have had extensive experience teaching sections and grading before they're entrusted with their own courses. But other schools will happily take entering grad students, with no teaching experience and no real graduate training in the field, and hand them their own courses to teach. The odds that the course will go well in these conditions? Well, you figure it out.

Extra Pointer. Graduate students at universities are often compared to residents at teaching hospitals. But the analogy is misleading. Residents are full-fledged doctors who have completed their medical degrees; graduate students are not professors and have not completed their academic degree.

7 . The student/faculty ratio . If you attend a school with 5 to 10 students per faculty member, you're likely to get a lot of individual attention from the faculty. A range of 11 to 15 is quite common at better state schools and equates to large intro courses but upper-division courses of a manageable size. Once you hit 16 to 20, you shouldn't be expecting much hand-holding from a professor—or even a chance to view your professor from closer than 10 feet (which in some cases could be a good thing). Over 20, you're probably at a university in such deep doo-doo that even a stimulus package won't be of much help.

8 . The percentage of students who graduate . If you go to a school with a graduation rate over 80 percent, that's great. A rate of 60 to 80 percent is quite normal. But under 60 percent should raise some eyebrows. At this point, the institution is operating with the idea that a lot of the students won't actually finish their degrees, and the program tends to be weighted toward the lower division, with much fewer resources devoted to the upper-division program. And while you're looking at graduation rates, check out the average time to degree. Seven years might be more than you're bargaining for.

9 . Whether you ' re require d to take computer-taught or on line classes . To save money, some universities are using computer programs for course instruction. Or you have to learn from lectures posted online, rather than live instructors. It's the new do-it-yourself method of instruction.

10. The a vailability of first- year experience courses . These show that the university really cares about helping entering students acclimate to the big U. Which is a nice touch.
So how do you find all this out? Check out the college guides and rankings and the college websites themselves. Ask admissions officers, students at the schools, and recent graduates. Send E-mail to appropriate college officials (they should want to answer you, if they want you to come to the school). These are not state secrets. And all of this information will help you make the best possible choice and get the most out of your college experience.

17 Ways College Campuses Are Changing

Lynn Jacobs and Jeremy Hyman,

US News and World Report, 20 May 2009

The fifth-century B.C. Greek philosopher Heraclitus used to exclaim everything changes, nothing stands still. Well, colleges are in flux, too. Here are the 17 biggest differences between college today and college just 10 years ago:

1. Booming enrollments. It's estimated that in 1999, 15 million students were enrolled in American colleges and universities. Today, the number is 19 million. And college enrollment looks to be growing-as far out as the eye can see-at a rate of 4 percent or so a year. Some unpleasant byproducts: humongous class sizes at many schools, interminable wait lists for popular or required classes, and more teaching by adjuncts and graduate students.

2. Skyrocketing tuition. According to the College Board, tuition for the academic year just past was approximately 6 percent higher, at both public and private universities, than it was the year before. And indeed, the rate of increase was approximately 6 percent a year for the decade before that. The inflation rate, on the other hand, ran about 3 percent per year for that same 10-year period. Public outcry has caused many universities to put a hold on tuition hikes for the time being. But when the economy strengthens a little bit... .

3. Increased government support. To some degree, the pain of out-of-control tuition increases has been lessened by a slew of recently introduced tax advantages, including the Hope credit, the lifetime learning credit, the student loan interest deduction, and the tuition and fees deduction. Very good information about all of these (including family-income caps and other requirements) is available at Sallie Mae's Web page.

4. New demographics. The male-female ratio is almost 60-40 at most schools. Forty percent of students are over the age of 25. And with many more first-generation students, foreign students, minority students, and returning students, expect a much broader mix of people in your classes.

5. More female bosses. Ten years ago, approximately 19 percent of college presidents were women. Now, four of the eight head honchos at Ivy League schools are women. And recently arrived University of California President Mark Yudof has proposed two new female presidents for UC-Davis and UC-San Francisco.

6. Community college explosion. Community colleges are flourishing, with new ones sprouting up all over the place. Indeed, more than 40 percent of U.S. college students now are enrolled at community (or junior or two-year) colleges. As before, community colleges are attracting students who are interested in getting associate degrees or some college experience before transferring to four-year colleges. But in a new twist, some students at four-year colleges now are picking up courses at community colleges from time to time--when they want to be closer to home, need less expensive credits, want to take classes with a professor rather than a TA, or can't get into classes they need at their own school.

7. New online opportunities. In addition to distance-learning institutions, such as the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, and Devry University, a number of big-name schools have put up selected courses at free, "opencourseware" sites. This is something great: top-notch professors in your own living room at no charge! Check out www.oyc.yale.edu (for Yale University), www.ocw.mit.org (for MIT), www.webcast.berkeley.edu (for UC-Berkeley), and www.ocw.consortium.org (for a general, worldwide directory).

8. First-year experience (FYE) courses. Used to be, first-year students had to "sink or swim" at the big U. But now-in an attempt to ease the pain (and also to stem the very high dropout rate at many schools)-colleges have forged new small-group classes, taught by regular faculty, especially for newly incoming students. Trouble is, no one has yet figured out quite what to teach. Some are seminars, where students study "big idea" books such as Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, or Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Others use 500-page, skills-teaching textbooks such as David Ellis's Becoming a Master Student or John Gardner's Your College Experience: Strategies for Success. And still others blow off the reading thing altogether and content themselves with once-a-week meetings in which you can befriend a prof, commiserate with 20 students just as worried as you, and--if you're lucky--have a pizza at the big U's expense. For two samples of imaginative FYE programs, check out UCLA's "Fiat Lux" program and the University of North Carolina's first-year seminars brochure.

9. Obsession about majors. Many schools encourage students to declare majors right when they come in. Many parents discourage students from considering majors in which there isn't a clear path to a high-paying (or, at least, some kind of) job. And many students think it's a point of special pride to do a double (or sometimes even triple) major. Not to mention picking up a minor or two on the side.

10. Diverse foreign languages. Used to be, most students fulfilled the language requirement by taking French, Spanish, or German. Now students have discovered Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese--the languages half the world's population actually speaks. And, in a nod to globalization (and student enrollments), some schools (most notably, the University of Southern California) have recently boarded up their German departments. Ach du lieber!

11. Proliferation of interdisciplinary programs. Interdisciplinary studies that used to be small programs have recently developed into full-fledged majors. These include fields such as gender, queer, Jewish, African-American, and Islamic studies, as well as area studies, such as Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, American, African diaspora, and European studies.

12. Emphasis on "service learning." Colleges are falling all over themselves to join the volunteerism spirit by setting up educational experiences, at home and abroad, in which learning is placed in the context of community service. Premeds are encouraged to volunteer at clinics or hospitals, art ed students are directed to mentor in the public schools, and environmental science students go into the community to help businesses reduce their carbon footprint.

13. New teaching tools. Overhead projectors, white boards, and transparencies have been sent to the junk pile with the advent of PowerPoint. "Smart" classrooms allow professors to integrate materials from the Internet directly into their lectures. And "clickers" allow instructors instant feedback on how well their students have grasped (or slept through) the last 10 minutes of the lecture.

14. Increased use of "E-resources." E-reserves have replaced required readings at the library. Textbooks now come electronically with the profs being able to custom-order the chapters they want. Courses have their own Web pages, where you can not only consult the syllabus and download lecture notes; you can often chat with other students in the course and sometimes even the professor. And, in the new spy vs. spy game, universities provide faculty with plagiarism-detection software such as Turnitin, while students cruise the (new electronic) paper-mills, where for only $9.99 you can take your chances at being thrown out of the big U.

15. More study abroad. Every university worth its salt has dozens of cooperative arrangements for junior-year (or indeed any-year) study abroad (though it's good to know that at many of the receiving institutions, the students aren't being offered the real university, in the real language, with the real faculty, but rather a special institute developed solely for visiting students. Caveat emptor) Since this is a "prestige item" for many colleges, there's often big fellowship money available for student travel.

16. Longer time to degree. The four-year college degree has largely faded, despite much hue and cry: Today, five, six, or even seven years is more common. Some reasons: more onerous requirements, bad advising, students working while at college, and students taking more semesters off. But the gravy train might be coming to an end: States are beginning to place caps on the number of semesters students can attend while paying in-state tuition. Hey, times are tough everywhere (especially in California and in Florida).

17. Increased consumerism. More and more, students and their parents are viewing college as a purchase--one for which you're entitled to get your money's worth. Bad grade? Go in to complain to the prof. Bad course? Tell the chair or the dean. Bad school? Transfer ASAP.