How to Arrive, Survive, and Thrive at the Right College for You

So maybe it's only four years. But it can be four of the best years of your life, or four or more of the worst. And what you make of yourself at college will stay with you pretty much forever. Scared? Don't be. That's life.

The first thing you need to know is that higher education, as it is called, is an industry with a swell head and a long, long tail -- and thanks to Chris Anderson over at Wired for making the general idea better known. Take the music business for example, as Anderson does. The top ten and top forty are what you hear on the radio. Chances are what you really want to hear is located further down the tail of the distribution; the trouble is finding it -- that's why you have friends.

Well the top ten colleges and universities are the ones you have probably heard of, and the top forty are the ones a high school guidance counselor might have heard of. The right one for you? That's why you need friends. Like this page. We wouldn't lie to you, would we? How do you know? Maybe you need more than one friend. That's why we aim to introduce you to a good many resources, which don't always agree with each other.

Let's start with books. We like books. Here are a few of the best. Thomas Sowell is a very distinguished African-American economist. (Other economists, and other African-Americans, don't like him much, because he's not exactly a liberal. Tough.) The problem with his book is that it is old. It was old even when my daughter headed for college, and hard to find. Even in our apartment, where it is hiding somewhere. I think. Sowell states the principles of looking for a good college better than anyone else, and they are what you should keep in mind when you look over the present scene.

Loren Pope, in Colleges that Change Lives, has identified forty colleges that you might not have heard of that are much better than the ones you have. My main problem with his book is the marketing. The way it's promoted, you'd think it was called Colleges for Losers. Yes, some of them are great places for students who weren't academic superstars. But many of them also happen to be excellent choices for excellent students as well.

In All American Colleges John Zmirak and his associates at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute examine half a hundred colleges chiefly of interest to students who are not Marxists or America-bashers, or who just want a traditional liberal arts education with a core curriculum. Choosing the Right Colleges evaluates more than three times that, including the name brands, from the same perspective. Is there a conservative bias here? If so, it is conservative in the best sense of the term. And if there is a liberal bias in Colleges that Change Lives, it is liberal in the best sense.

Don't neglect the Templeton Guide just because it uses that deadly phrase Character Building, which puts me in mind of hard beds, cold showers, junping jacks, and the smell of Lysol in locker rooms. It is an attempt to acknowledge that we are more than brains with stomachs, that we have a need to achieve that won't ever be satisfied with money alone. And who can deny that? In practice, nearly everybody. But we don't have to. Even money itself tends to come to men and women driven by more powerful motivations.

Why are you going to college? It is just to get away from home? Even that's a good place to start: it means you need to get away from the narrow perspectives of your family and their community, and know that you need to. Curiosity about the wider world is where all education starts, and since all education is self-education, there is no reason why you can't start here and now. As before, I am suggesting some books.

All young people know instinctively that there's more to life than anybody they know suspects, and some go off to college to look for it. A Guide for the Perplexed shows that there's more, much more, to life than even academics imagine. Lord Russell wrote many silly books like Marriage and Morals and Why I am Not a Christian. You may have to read one or both of these at college. Russell had it all, money, influence, women -- lots of women -- but the only thing that kept him from suicide was (are you ready for this?) mathematics. Not that you have to become a mathematician, though I often wish Russell had stuck to his math and left philosophy alone. But what he needed, and what you need, is a passionate interest in something worth doing for its own sake. That is one of many fine points in a generally wise book by a generally foolish man. (Another is, beware of envy.) Evelyn Underhill, who lived at about the same time as Russell, but not nearly as long, was a woman widely recognized as a spiritual master by Christians -- and non Christians -- of all denominations. Her little book on mysticism is a classic manual of how to get a higher perspective on things. (Her big book on mysticism is a massive masterpiece of scholarship. Save it for graduate school. And not for every graduate school.)

Focusing is another little book with a simple technique that can help enormously when you face upsetting situations. Don't Shoot the Dog reminds us that we wouldn't treat animals the way we often treat people, because it wouldn't work. The author shows that what works with dolphins at Sea World can work with your roommate, your little sister, and even (why not?) Mom and Dad. These are things you can use right now. You don't need to wait for college.

In the Good Old Days of the Medieval university, there were seven Liberal Arts, three dealing with language, four with the quantitative side of things. In Latin, the language of learining, they were called the Three Ways, or Trivia, and the Four Ways, or Quadrivia. (The Quadrivia consisted of arithemetic, geometry, music theory, and astronomy, and that's all I have to say about them.)

Maybe there was a falling off in the quality of education at the end of the Middle Ages, what with the Black Plague and all, and this led to the generally negative meaning of "trivia" in the modern languages. Or maybe it was just that in the so-called Renaissance everybody was a wiseass. (Medieval physicians knew very well that wounds have to be cleansed. Then the printing press was invented, and the silliest ideas of the old Greeks and Romans became common knowledge. Because an old Roman named Galen said wounds should be allowed to fester, and his book was an early best seller, people suffered and died needlessly for another four hundred years and more.)

The Trivium, Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, that is, careful reading, accurate analysis, and effective persuasion, are still what it's all about. A fellow called Mortimer Adler is the real authority on these things, and I have linked to his books on reading, listening and speaking, and analysis. Read them. Just don't the professors see you with them: Mortimer Adler is not PC. He was notorious for getting Brittanica to print up sets of the Great Books of the Western World, and getting ordinary people to read them. And discuss them. Without a professor to tell them what to think. And then there's the little matter of religion. First he decided there is a God. Then, already an old man, he accepted Christian baptism. Finally, worst of all, he joined the Catholic Church. A very bad example according to the people who call themselved the "Smarts."

Finally, I suggest a book on writing by one of the last of the real masters, and a book on research by real scholars.

All of which should be pretty useful even now. And don't be afraid of Adler; these books were written before he got religion.

Many prospective college students come from families and communities where religious belief, practice, and lifestyle are treasured. In many college settings these are not highly valued or even well tolerated. I don't think it's a good idea to go somewhere you will be despised for your beliefs or where your intellectual abilities are not acknowledged or nurtured because of them. On the other hand, as you grow intellectually your understanding of your faith must grow accordingly, or it will eventually wither away and die. Now that may be what you want, or think you want. But whatever you finally decide, it is a good idea, a very good idea, to have an intelligent appreciation of the faith tradition you are coming from. And your college may not help very much, even if it has some kind of church affiliation. I would like to suggest five books in the Christian tradition which would repay your serious study whatever your denomination. (I am, by the way, not slighting other religions, but my knowledge of them is antoropoligical, philosophical and theological, and I don't trust my grasp of how they are lived out in America today. And they are better toleratied on many campuses than Christianity.) I have had the good fortune to discuss these five with Evangelical, Orthodox, and Catholic scholars, and have the impression that each is considered a solid work on one aspect of the tradition they have in common. (Yes, we need to be aware of what are called denominational distinctives, but these will be much less important in your college experience than what sharply divides all Christians from the common culture of American academe as a whole.) The authors represent a broad spectrum of churches; my major regret is that there is no representative of Eastern Orthodoxy. (I do wish somebody would bring Berdyaev's Meaning of the Creative Act back into print: my own education would have been so much poorer without it. But that's why there are libraries.)