What students want And what you can do about it: what's on the minds of college students? A Harvard researcher spent the last 15 years finding out, and his answers may surprise you - Interview

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Oct, 2001 by Tim Goral

Why do some students struggle through college, while others seem to graduate easily? What can campus leaders do to make the college years more successful? Those were among the questions asked by Richard Light, professor in the Graduate School of Education and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Light and a team of researchers from some 90 campuses spent nearly 15 years going directly to the source--students--to find their answers.

Beginning in 1986, the team met with thousands of students in one-on-one interviews lasting several hours each. Now, Light has published the findings in a new book called Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds (Harvard University Press). Light recently spoke with Matrix about the book and what lessons campus leaders can draw from the team's findings.

MATRIX: You say several times in the book that what you learned surprised you. What were some of these surprises?

LIGHT: We had assumed that most students wanted us to "get out of their way." In other words, let them be grownups. But, we found that at least 75 percent of the students said they want campus leaders--the deans, faculty, the people who run the residence halls, and even the campus president himself--to "get more in their way." They didn't mean they wanted to be told what to do every minute because they are adults. Rather, they said, "We want advice, we want campus leaders to set a tone here. We would welcome more suggestions on how to do things constructively, to get more out of our precious few years here at college."

That goes against the policies of many campuses where the deans proudly announce, "We admit talented students and then get out of their way, because they learn a lot from one another, and we don't want to muck up that process."

The second surprise came when we asked incoming freshman to think of all the skills that they'd like to improve in college. Which particular skill would they most like to improve? By an enormous factor, the students in the Harvard study chose improving their writing skills.

These findings about writing led to a wonderful outcome. More and more faculty began to build writing assignments into their courses--courses that traditionally didn't have writing. Biology professors began not just teaching the science, but now they might also ask each student for two or three short papers over the term interpreting their findings for a layman. This was a new thing for many of these faculty members.

MATRIX: One student profiled in the book says he got more from writing for other students than for a teacher, because he had to show he understood the information.

LIGHT: Yes, in fact, one of the questions we asked seniors was to think of all the courses they took in their years at college. Which one or two courses had the biggest impact, and what was special about them?

Hundreds of students told us their best learning experience came when they had to write a paper not just to hand in to the professor but to also distribute to their fellow students.

As an interviewer, I asked why this was such a big deal to them and they responded, "Do you know how hard that was for me? Instead of writing for the professor, whom I assumed was an expert in American history, suddenly I'm writing a five-page paper that will be distributed to my classmates as well as the professor. I had to ask myself what assumptions could I make about what my fellow students know, and what do I need to spell out in my paper?"

These students said it was a great exercise in thinking about writing for a different audience.

Another thing that emerged--which I'm sure is true at most colleges--was that students said they really benefited from the diverse backgrounds that black, white, Asian-American and Latino students brought to campus by reading their perspectives in a short written piece. If they just hand in papers to the professor, the professor gets all these different perspectives, but the students don't.

In one case, the professor asked five students to write a paper on controlling crime in urban areas, and to distribute the papers for the next week's discussion. One student said, "It was amazing. There were two black students and three white students. The white students said the answer was to put more police in the neighborhoods, while the two black students said the worst thing you could do was put more police in the neighborhood."

What a great way for college faculty to capitalize on the increasing diversity that is on campuses today, and will only continue to grow.

MATRIX: You write that Harvard encourages diversity in its first-year residence hall arrangements. Is this different from other schools?

LIGHT: About half the schools I know of that have dormitories offer some version of random assignments, meaning mat first-year students are assigned their roommates without regard to race.

But, there are also many schools that have "theme dorms" or race-based dorms. They might not use those words, but it is clear that's what they are doing. In those schools, the black students can choose to live in the dorm for black students. The same is true for Latino students, or for Asian-American students and so on.