In this column I’d like to introduce the two guides produced by ISI to aid students and parents selecting schools. Our books,
Choosing the Right College and
All American Colleges are intended as replacements for the standard college guides which you’ll find alongside it on the shelves at your local bookstore. Most of those guides rank schools—sometimes according to criteria which are pretty anti-educational on the face of it: Best Party School, Best School for Budding Activists, Best Place to Prepare for a Government Job, et cetera. Others, such as
U.S. News and World Report, use a standard which is less obviously silly: They rate schools by how hard they are to get into, that is, by what percentage of applicants they turn away. Now this criterion has its advantages: It’s objective, based on statistics, and it points out which schools are considered most prestigious, and are consequently attracting the most applicants. But when you think about it, it’s really no better than those other rankings. It’s essentially based on a popularity contest. Imagine choosing which girl or boy you wanted to marry based on who had turned the most other people down? Pretty stupid, isn’t it? It tells you nothing about what’s going on at the school, what you’ll learn there, how your value and faith will fare on that campus…. Not a thing. It just tells you essentially… what other high school students think about a school. You might as well just ask your friends. Save that 20 bucks.
Our guides are different. Unlike all the others, they are based on a carefully-thought out and well-reasoned philosophy of education, which I’ll outline for you here. The one thing these guides don’t really help with is…well, picking the best college for you. This is probably the toughest choice you’ve had to make so far in your life—and will make a huge difference in how the rest of it turns out. Colleges can form your character—or twist it. They can challenge, enrich, and deepen your treasured beliefs—or trash them and leave you with nothing. They can help you find lifelong friendships, professional contacts, and intellectual mentors—or drop you in the world with not much more than a degree and a load of debt. It all depends on which one you choose—which in turn depends on who you are. We don’t assume there’s one (or a list of 10 or 20) colleges which would be right for everyone, if only they could get into them. Instead, there’s a wide range of schools with strengths and weaknesses which might complement your own, with vastly different atmospheres and codes, which suit some students but might tend to stifle others.
It’s our job to tell you which is which. Reading through our essays, you’ll see, side-by-side, comments by current students, professors, and graduates, selections from research studies and investigative journalism, analyses of curricula, fond reminiscences and horror stories. Each one has been compiled by a team of reporters, who consulted a wide range of sources to give you the most candid, comprehensive, and up-to-date description of what life is really like on campus, what you’d learn there, where are the treasure-troves and where the pitfalls. You’ll find here elitist Ivies, where world-famous scholars deliver lectures to hundreds of ambitious activists, tiny religious colleges that study the Great Books and the Bible, and workaday state universities, each with a few excellent programs—and just about everything in between. You’ll learn which colleges have strong sports teams, vital, faith-filled chaplaincies, and good systems for providing academic advice. And which ones have co-ed bathrooms, by the way.
Unlike some other guides, we are independently researched, written, and funded. (Believe it or not, some books make schools pay in order to be included.) Others let schools write their own profiles. How helpful is that? If you want to know what a school says about itself—go check its Web site. Or call its public relations department. (They sometimes call us, complaining about our candor.)
We’re also up front about our point of view. We have an agenda, and it’s laid out right in the front of our books—our view of what constitutes a good education. There are many different views out there on this topic, and most of them are partial or just plain wrong. Is a “good education” one that gives students the best chance to land a high-paying job? One that gives them entrée to the circles of cultural power? One that drenches them in diversity, studies mainly foreign and marginalized cultures, and teaches them to undermine the “status quo”? And how should such an education be structured—like a Shonee’s breakfast, where students pick and choose every item on their plate? Or like a thoughtfully constructed prix-fix menu at a fine restaurant—with a careful balance of meaty and flavorful, fresh ingredients prepared in a classic style? We tell you which schools are which.
While it may seem un-American to say it, we don’t believe in the absolute virtue of choice. Not every high-school kid comes into college knowing what he needs to learn, or even prepared to learn it. It’s a sad fact that U.S. secondary education does not compare to what is offered in Europe or Japan. The mass-egalitarian ideology which pervades our secondary schools has dumbed most of us down. To expect every American teenager to take responsibility for planning every detail of his education is to guarantee that most of them will fail. They will emerge with a few specialties, a grab-bag of information, a pile of fashionable prejudices, and little else. This is what happens when we treat the fragile, multifarious fruit of thousands of years of human culture as a pile of consumer goods to be handled, sniffed, and accepted or rejected, according to whim.
If you’re wondering what we think really does constitute a solid liberal arts education… stay tuned. I’ll cover that in my next column.
