What Makes Attending a 4-Year Residential College Worth the Cost?

On a recent tour of Tufts University, I was impressed by the way our guide described his own experiences as a full-time, residential student. There was something about his passion that seemed genuine. He said he liked Tufts because it was a place where "smart is cool" and "everyone is a geek." He talked about meeting other students who were so passionate about their disciplines that "you should sit down before asking them about their research," because you would almost certainly be with them for a while. He described the frequent, positive interactions between faculty and students, interactions encouraged by the school's SPIRIT (Students and Professors Integrating Recreation, Intellect and Teaching) FUND, which pays for the (non-alcoholic) drinks when a faculty member invites a student to an on-campus cafe. He recounted serendipitous experiences, such as going to talk to a professor about a concept mentioned in class and getting so involved in the conversation that the meeting eventually led to a life-changing research internship.

I felt inspired, but also puzzled. I'm sure my son would love to attend a college where faculty are truly "caring and accessible," and students are "interested in serious intellectual discussions, but don't take themselves too seriously." Who wouldn't? What I had trouble understanding was why those qualities were considered noteworthy. Given the extraordinarily high cost of tuition, why aren't most college students highly motivated and engaged? Why is it an anomaly for a student to be interested in serious academic debate? Or for faculty and students to be interacting as equals?


Like many other home educators, I've questioned whether "The College Experience"—living on campus, attending classes full-time—is necessary, especially when so many do-it-yourself options for higher education seem to be available. According to Blake Boles, author of Better Than College and Director of Unschool Adventures, "You can gain skills, community, independence, exposure, and work opportunities by piecing together a self-directed curriculum of real-world projects" ("12 Ways to Educate Yourself Without College," Huffington Post).

If you don't want to learn alone—and most of us don't—you can develop a Personal Learning Network (PLN) or join an online study group (as described in "5 Things You Can Do to Begin Developing Your Personal Learning Network" by Lisa Nielsen, and "Students in Free Online Courses Form Groups to Study and Socialize" by Ben Pokross).

But in spite of all these opportunities, I found myself listening to this Tufts tour guide as he talked about aspects of college life that I felt certain would be unattainable outside the campus environment. My heart was telling me that my son needed to have this experience if it was at all possible for him to attend. As Anya Kamenetz admits in her book, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, "the main advantage of a traditional college over open education and distance learning is face time with peers and faculty."

Assuming it's face time that students want, is there any reliable way to evaluate how well a college facilitates peer-to-peer and student-faculty interactions? The only relevant data I've found so far is from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), or "Nessie," which has been collecting feedback from college students for the past 13 years ("Refreshing Engagement: NSSE at 13," Change magazine, May-June 2013).

"NSSE doesn't directly measure learning, the end goal. But what it does measure – student engagement – offers a dependable proxy. Decades of research show that the more actively students participate in their education, the more likely they are to learn. So NSSE's questions seek to gauge whether (and how often) students do things such as interact with faculty and classmates, use campus services and put effort into their studies" ("NSSE Changes How Colleges Judge Success, Weakness" by Mary Beth Marklein, USA Today).

What could be more obvious? Students learn best when they actively participate in their education and put effort into their studies. It seems reasonable to assess whether this is actually happening on college campuses.

Tufts happens to be one of the institutions that participates in the survey, but (unfortunately) the public isn't given access to results for specific institutions, unless the institution chooses to publish their own results (as Elon University did in 2012). Still, it's interesting to see what questions the survey asks. Perhaps some of these same questions could be asked by students and parents during college information sessions. I think it might also be interesting to compare the results of the student survey to the results of the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE).

My hope is that we will eventually have better ways of assessing exactly what attendance at a college provides that self-directed learning doesn't. Then, maybe, we'll be able to weigh our decisions with something other than our hearts.