Our useful books page has several great reads for any college-bound student or applicant. However, one book that gives a unique perspective on the process is “Spying On The College Of Your Choice,” by Steven Oppenheimer.

Instead of focusing on the application process and statistics of particular colleges, Oppenheimer’s book discusses how to get the most out of college visits.

“The book is meant to help high school students and their parents know what questions to ask, and what issues to explore, when visiting college campuses,” says Oppenheimer.

While the vast majority of the book is geared towards the average high school student, there are also several more specialized sections (such as one for married couples planning on attending the same college or university).

Below, read an expert from the section entitled “The Classroom Experience.” If you like what you see, then go ahead and order “Spying On The College Of Your Choice” from Amazon.
Excerpt from “Spying On The Colleges” (Copyright © 2004 Steven C. Oppenheimer):

The Classroom Experience

What To Investigate

The single most important thing about your educational experience is whether classes are stimulating, well-taught, and inspire student participation.

How To Investigate It

The way to investigate this is to visit classes. To do this, you may need the permission of the administration or the professors. Try to ask the professors just before the classes start – you don’t want to walk in during the middle of a class.

If the school does not allow you to visit classes—or if they place restrictions, limiting you to just a few classes—then they are not permitting you to get all the information that might help you in making a good decision. Think about that!

Assuming you can visit classes:

• Visit the classes taught by the popular professors. The college admissions office will probably tell you about a Professor Smith, or a Professor Jones, who is just terrific, and in whose class you just must sit in. Or, the undergraduates may recommend certain professors.
• Fine – go sit in on those classes. Decide for yourself if you think the class is really that great. If you think the professor is not so hot—and if this is the college’s idea of a great professor—then just imagine what the other teachers might be like.
• Try to distinguish between a merely entertaining class on the one hand, versus a truly educational class on the other. Great showmanship is fun, but it doesn’t always really impart new knowledge. Ideally, a professor draws students into a dialogue in class, and coaxes new ideas from them.
• In all likelihood, the class will be great – entertaining and intellectually stimulating. After all, the college wants you to see how great they are. They wouldn’t send you there unless they thought you’d like it. Which is why you should…
• Visit the classes taught by the not-especially popular professors. Sit in on classes that you’ve chosen more or less at random. Some classes from your potential major, and some classes in other fields as well. The more such classes you can visit, the more you’ll get a sense for the quality of the teaching. You don’t need to stay for the whole class; sitting in for ten or fifteen minutes can give you the flavor of things.
• Between colleges, try to visit the same type of class – same department, same subject matter. For example, visit a Shakespearean literature class at each college; or visit an introduction to astronomy class at each college. This lets you compare the style of presentation within the same type of subject matter.
• Watch the students as well as the professors. Are we awake today, class!? Are we interested in what the professor is saying, or are we just scribbling notes in automatic mode? Are we focused on the blackboard, or are we having an out-of-body experience?
• Even the best professors cannot work magic with students who are apathetic, over-stressed, or too terrified of failing to enjoy the learning. There has to be a chemistry between professors and students, a give-and-take, a flow like the kind you see when good dancers take to the dance floor.
• If you are mildly fortunate, you’ve already experienced good teaching in high school. You can sense it when you see it again. On the other hand, if your high school education has not been so rewarding, then ask yourself: Is what I see here, at this college, better than what I’ve seen in high school? Will this be a step up in the quality of learning?

Ask The Students You Meet Between Classes or After Classes

• How do they feel about their education? Are they enjoying their classes?
• Are they finding that most of the professors are really dedicated to their teaching?
• Is the instruction clear?
• Do they feel they are getting the direction and support they need?
• Are they learning what they expected to learn? (We’ll talk more about that question in the next chapter.)
• Is it fun?
• Is it challenging without being more than they can handle?
• When something is not clear in classes, and they ask for a clarification, does the second explanation, or the third, really clear up the things that they could not understand the first time it was explained?
• In general, do they find that the faculty are open to feedback about the course content, or the way in which the material is presented?
• Do the faculty make themselves readily available during office hours?

For this vital issue—exploring the quality of the classroom education—talking to current undergrads is your best method of spying. Unfortunately, it’s a difficult question on which to get a solid answer: “Is the teaching any good?” I mean, what is good teaching, anyway? You like Professor Jones, I think he stinks, but I like Professor Smith (who you don’t like).

Still, it’s a crucial question—or a group of questions, as I’ve suggested above—and so you need to ask, and you need to track down and ask multiple students. Be sure to talk to at least three or four students, and not ones who are all obviously friends with each other. (People who are happy tend to clump together, and people who are unhappy also tend to clump together, sort of like PostIt notes of the same color.)

And speaking of notes, TAKE NOTES. Compare your notes, compare the answers you get to these same questions, from one college campus to another. This is why visiting different schools is so important, because as you compare responses from one school to another you’ll start to see differences.

At ABC College, the students candidly tell you that the teaching is not as strong as they’d like in astronomy, and they spend a lot of time working together after class to figure things out from the book. At DEF University, the students tell you the astronomy teaching is good – but they say it without much enthusiasm. At XYZ College, the astronomy students—and you’ve spoken with three, at least, but preferably four or five, and not all in one group—most of them confidently report that they can keep up with the instruction, and that at least most of the professors are good.

Ultimately, as you visit several colleges, and visit as many classes as possible, you will gain a sense of what kind of teaching—what kind of classroom experience—appeals to you. You’ll know it when you are in the middle of it, even as a visiting high school student.

Here is another group of crucial questions you can ask of both upper-class students, and faculty:

• Do you know of any students who have either quit the college, or been thrown out of the school, because they did not like the academics, or could not cut it academically?
• Do you think that student (or those students) was just not trying hard enough, or is there something about the academic program here that throws a curve ball even at some students who are trying hard?
• What kinds of students are most likely to enjoy academic success here? Can you describe what kinds of students it would be who, even if they are trying hard, are most likely to run into problems academically?

Seminars Vs. Lectures

Different college subjects can lend themselves to different types of teaching and learning methods. For example, in the physical and biological sciences, and engineering—where, typically, the professor knows a whole lot of very technical stuff that you know nothing about (often, even after you’ve read the textbook assignments)—the traditional mode of teaching is straight lecture, combined with lab classes where you do experiments. In something like acting, music, or dance, the mode of teaching is often much more interactive, with the professor leading the class through various participatory exercises.

In your traditional liberal arts and social science subjects, which we will focus on for just a moment, you are likely to have basically two options for your college education: Lectures, and seminar. Liberal arts and social science lectures, in fields like history, literature, psychology, economics, and philosophy, are very much like lectures in the sciences: The professor gets up at the front of the room and explains to you the subject matter, whether its how to interpret a play by Shakespeare or how to understand the events of the French Revolution. This is the kind of classroom method you have probably had the most experience with up until now, in your high school years. Seminars are quite different. In a seminar approach to learning, you come to class having read the material (the same as you have done, hopefully, for lecture classes); but now, the students have a much more active role in the learning process. The class becomes a discussion, led by the professor, but shared by all the students. There are pros and cons to both lectures and seminars, and I’m going to give you a quick summary of what I see as the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Lectures

The Good Side

With a lecture, you are basically depending on one person to get it right or get it wrong, and that’s the professor. With a little luck, you get a good professor, and you get good lectures. The professors know what they are talking about; what they talk about is relevant both to the subject matter and to you as a person; and they express themselves in a way that is interesting and clear. Your time is not wasted listening to other people—like fellow students—who really know as little about the subject as you do.

The Bad Side

Well, of course, it’s just inevitable, in every field, some people are just not good at their jobs—and that includes some college professors—and so you have a bad class. But even with good professors, there are two limits to lectures. First, while you usually get to ask questions, basically you are a passive participant in class. You don’t experience the intellectual and personal growth that can come from having to develop, share, and support your ideas among an audience of classmates. Second, with lectures, it is easy for some professors to go off on very esoteric, abstract tangents that are not likely to be of interest to most undergraduates. (For more on that, see the next section, Teaching Versus Research, where we discuss what happens when professors spend too much time on research and not enough on teaching. Also see the next chapter, on the curriculum.)

Seminars

The Good Side

With active discussion among students, you get to hear many perspectives and points of view on the reading. Also, as indicated just above, you learn to develop your thoughts, articulate them in front of a group of people, and defend them when they are challenged. Ideally, you also learn to reconsider your ideas when you discover that people are offering valid criticisms of your views. You can also learn to be not only an effective speaker, but a good listener. Finally, because you and all your fellow students need to be able to participate, there is somewhat less risk that the discussion goes off into advanced topics that might interest the professor, but that no one else has a clue about.

The Bad Side

Sometimes more than just a few students have not done the reading, and it shows – the discussion goes nowhere. Also, depending on the particular people in your class, there may be some people who hog the discussion, while other students introduce irrelevant or absurd ideas. Your professor is supposed to moderate the discussion, both to make sure it stays on track, and to ensure that everyone gets a fair chance to speak. But in my observation, moderating a discussion is even more difficult than lecturing. In other words, it takes a pretty fortunate mix of both a good professor to facilitate the discussion; and good students who both come prepared for class, and who can hold a constructive conversation together as a group.

Frankly, it’s a crap shoot as to whether it works or not. Finally, while learning to articulate and support your views to others can be a growth experience, it is simply too overwhelming and scary for some students—perhaps for you—who would in fact fare better and learn more by sitting back and listening to a good lecture.

The reality is that at most larger schools, the primary classes are often too large for seminars anyway. The fact is, you will most likely go to a school that features seminars only if you can afford (or get a scholarship to) a relatively small liberal arts college. If you can only afford the state college, where large classes typically predominate, you mainly will be dealing with lectures anyway.

Questions To Ask

However, if you are going to attend a school which uses the seminar approach to learning—or if you are considering such a school—then you definitely want to visit the college campus. And, here are a few questions you should ask the students:

• Typically, have most students who come to seminar done the necessary readings and other preparations?
• Typically—again, this is not about every class, all the time, you are asking about most of the time—do students work well together in seminar, truly hearing each other, and cooperating with each other?
• For the most part, are the faculty effective at facilitating the discussions?
• Do the faculty actually lead discussions, or do they lecture? At some schools where the mode of learning is supposed to be seminar discussion, more than a few faculty just can’t resist the temptation to lecture! So, if seminar is really what you are looking for, make sure that seminars are what you really will get!

Of course, you should sit in on some of the seminars. Try to sit in on more than one, if possible, and observe how well they go. Are most of the students actively participating? Do they really seem to listen to each other? Do they respect each other, or on the other hand do they attack each other? Ask yourself if you would really feel comfortable being an active participant in this kind of forum.

A final note: State university systems typically have more than one campus; and some campuses may have a better student/faculty ratio than others. The smaller this ratio (the fewer students per professor), the better the chance that the college can have at least some seminar type classes, at least at the upper-class level, if not the freshman level. So if you are planning to attend the state university, and you’d like to have at least some experience with seminars in college, then investigate which of the campuses—if any—have more seminars than the others. You could then choose to attend that campus.

I hope you enjoyed reading this excerpt from “Spying On The Colleges.” For more advice on getting the most out of college visits, order the book from Amazon.