How to Get the Most Out of College

How to Get the Most Out of College
These are privileged, pivotal years. Navigate them with as much care as you did
the path that got you there.
By Frank Bruni, New York Times Opinion Columnist Aug. 17, 2018
We overwhelm teenagers with advice about choosing a college. Go big. Go small. Put prestige
above cost. Do the opposite. We inundate them with tips for getting in. Spend summers this way.
Write essays that way. Play a niche sport. Play an obscure instrument.
And then? We go mum, mustering less urgency and fewer words for the subject of actually
navigating the crucial college years to best effect. It’s strange. And it’s stupid, because how a
student goes to school matters much, much more than where. So for several years — during
visits to campuses, interviews with experts on higher education and interactions with recent
graduates — I’ve been gathering wisdom along those lines.
My interest is not which types of programs at which kinds of institutions yield the surest
employment and highest salaries. That information is already out there and always changing. I
also worry that it casts college as purely vocational and plants the false notion that, at the age of
18, you know yourself well enough to plot out the entirety of your professional life.
Instead, my focus is on optimal ways to socialize, to prioritize, to pick up skills integral to any
career and to open up exciting opportunities both en route to a degree and long after you’ve
acquired that degree. Not nearly enough of the roughly 20 million Americans beginning or
resuming college every semester pause, in their trepidation and exhilaration, to think about that.
Many don’t have the luxury: College for them is a slapdash scramble to grab credits as they can
while working a demanding job, caring for family members or both. More than a third of the

students enrolled in higher education in this country attend two-year institutions. Those at four-
year institutions often don’t participate in the romantic ideal of nurturing dormitories and verdant

quadrangles. They live with parents. They pray for parking.