This fall, millions of students and their parents will descend on college campuses, hoping to find their dream school. But according to one college professor, they’re looking in all the wrong places.
In his new book[1], “Campus Confidential: How College Works Or Doesn’t for Professors Parents and Students,” Jacques Berlinerblau, the director of the program for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, argues that understanding the relationship between professors and students is key to picking a good school.
At many of the nation’s most prestigious colleges, students are paying tens of thousands of dollars to attend a school whose reputation is based in part on its star professors, but they rarely get the chance to interact with those vaunted employees, he argues.
MarketWatch spoke with Berlinerblau to find out what students and families should really be looking for on the campus tour.
MarketWatch: How did you come to the idea for the book?
Jacques Berlinerblau: As a college professor I was struck by how completely off [parents] were in terms of what they were looking for and what they thought was important. They don’t understand college and they really don’t understand professors and what’s actually happening between professors and undergraduates.
MarketWatch: What are some of the misconceptions about that relationship?
Berlinerblau: The star faculty will be anywhere near these undergraduates during their four- to five-year stay on campus. The star faculty — and even the very good faculty — are fire-walled from the undergraduates by the administration and by the volition of the professors themselves.
MarketWatch: How did we get to a place where undergraduates aren’t interacting with leading professors?
Berlinerblau: It is our distorted tenure system. It’s neither serving scholars — because very few people are getting tenure[2] — and it’s not serving students because the tenure system incentivizes professors to concentrate on research.
The undergraduates are paying these astronomical tuitions, putatively to study with these great professors. What they’re getting instead are these contingent faculty members who are working under deplorable conditions.
MarketWatch: What should students look for in a college?
Berlinerblau: [Research indicates that many commonly used college ranking systems reward factors like selectivity[3], which isn’t a good indication of what a school can do for its students].
Ignore the rankings. The rankings have done tremendous damage to American higher education.
Look for experiential learning. This is a new trend in American higher education, getting professors and students to work together on projects that are meaningful to both. Does the school have a robust experiential learning program?
Class size. Twenty-five students, that’s kind of a threshold, when...