Reed Grads Lead Pack in Collegiate Happiness

NYT poll finds 76 percent of Reedies to rate their college experiences as excellent, whereas nationally only 54 percent of graduates rated their schools such a high rating (65 percent of both Penn and Michigan grads described their college years as excellent). Evidently the recipe for a happy undergraduate education is "Communism, Atheism, Free Love."

The aforementioned poll has many rich findings, which I hope to f ind time to digest. Though a survey of graduates is not necessarily the best way to judge the "quality" of a school (much less its appropriateness for any particular student), the NYT poll's detailed analysis outperforms the crude aggregate indices of U.S. News and the impressionistic summaries of guidebooks in suggesting how Penn, Reed, and Michigan fair in promoting students' intellectual and personal development.

Jacques Steinberg's discussion of the poll results ends with this thoughtful conclusion, which he gives after quoting a Reed alum who found his college years most valuable:

One conclusion to be drawn from Andrew’s obvious satisfaction with his education, when laid alongside the responses of so many of his peers, is that the convoluted process of matching students to colleges ultimately does what it is supposed to do. But in the end, I also find myself reflecting on the ongoing regrets expressed by so many of the alumni we contacted — not with their overall college experiences but with the day-to-day choices they made, whether it was the belly-dancing class that one Reed graduate said she missed out on because she was studying too hard or the Greek tragedy that lay untouched on another Reed student’s dorm-room bookshelf and now, in all likelihood, will never be opened.

Perhaps we should be spending a little less time coaching and cajoling high-school students about how to get into college, or even how to identify that mythical “right” college, and instead help them prepare a little better for how to strike a balance, or explore what they hope to accomplish, once they get there.

Having throughout college skipped debate tournaments in order to do yet more studying - and
now occasionally lamenting those choices (particularly since, given my current state of unemployment, I was obviously studying the wrong things) - Steinberg's plea struck me as on the money.