How Students Can Make the Most of Their College Education

Participating in a new community is an integral part of the college experience. Orion Production

In this fall of 2024, around 16 million students will be enrolled in American colleges and universities. That’s roughly the equivalent of the combined populations of our nation’s five largest cities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Phoenix.

The newcomers in this grand parade of undergraduates may arrive on campus wondering whether they’re prepared for the rigors of college academics. Veterans of the classroom may return to their studies, asking themselves how to get the greatest good from their college experience.

The dean of students at the University of Dallas, Greg Roper, Ph.D., was happy to offer some answers to such questions.

Read, Read, Read

To best prepare for college, Roper first stressed the importance of reading.

“If they have a life of reading, we can work with them. If they don’t have that life, it’s very difficult,” he said. “I think you have to have a life of reading at any serious college, although I’m not sure a lot of colleges are serious these days.”

Be Ready to Agree ... And to Disagree

Being able to engage in discussion and argumentation are second on Roper’s list for success, particularly in a liberal arts program.

“I mean the grand Western tradition, going back to Socrates, of discussing, talking with people, having people disagree with you, having people poke holes in your arguments. Our president, J.J. Sanford, calls it arguing without quarreling. What students here love is to then go out of class and keep talking and working these things through.”

Like reading, Roper pointed out, learning this art of debate can begin at home before ever setting foot on a university campus.

“I would encourage parents to have dinnertime conversations where it’s OK to disagree with Mom and Dad,” he said.

Learn to Handle Failure

By allowing their children to make mistakes and deal with failure, parents will also help prepare them for college.

“Sometimes, the anxiety and stress and depression of students,” he said, “comes from fear of failure. If I were to say anything to parents today, I would say: ‘Sometimes, you kind of pull back. You let them stumble and skin up their knees, and let them know it’s all right. Let them have the experience of stumbling a little bit.’”

Later, he added, “There’s a lot of freedom when you’re away at college, and not everybody is ready to use their freedom well.”

Have a Growth Mindset

One book that has strongly influenced Roper’s desire to help college students overcome failure, indeed to regard it as a stepping stone toward achievement, is psychologist Carol Dwek’s “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.” Fascinated by the question of how people coped with failure, Dwek came to see two mindsets at work when confronted by adversity.

The fixed mindset, the belief that our abilities are already carved in stone, brought frustration and self-defeat, while the growth mindset, that we can keep shaping and honing the skills and talents we possess, encouraged problem-solving and led to success.

To make this point, Roper used the analogy of an athlete who, from an early age, is assured he has a natural talent. The fixed mindset gives him a feeling of superiority over others, so that he may even neglect practice or working to improve his performance. Ultimately, as he finds himself increasingly faced by players as good or better than him, he may suffer a real crisis, being unprepared for his fall as the top performer.

On the other hand, the athlete with a growth mindset, Roper said, acknowledges mistakes and weaknesses and works to overcome them.

The same holds true for academics.

“The point of a test,” said Roper, “is not to brand you, like you are good, you are bad, but it’s to help you understand where your weaknesses are, what are the things you haven’t mastered. In general chemistry, for example, we’re trying to make sure you have some skill so you can go on to organic chemistry. We’re not testing your worth as a human being.”

In this situation and others—a C on a composition for students accustomed to A’s or a missed deadline—students with a fixed mindset who had always considered themselves a cut above their peers can fall into depression. When he encounters this mindset, Roper works on ways to help the student make changes.

Prioritize What’s Really Important

“The language we use,” Roper says, “shapes our life and our imaginative life.”

This dean practices what he preaches. During our conversation, for example, he distinguished between an individual and a person, license and liberty, and he refined the definition of virtue.

“So much of American culture sees freedom only in terms of license,” he said, and went on to explain that the university should offer the view that this isn’t the way to be happy. Instead, students should be taught both in the classroom and by way of example that liberty, when properly understood, means choosing the right path in life.

Linked to license is our extreme individualism.

“You’re not an individual,” Roper tells students. “You’re a person.” The individual believes in self-autonomy, whereas seeing yourself as a person means family, friends, and community have “claims on you.”

In an April 2023 article, “Eight Rules for the Dean of Students,” Roper wrote, “One thing I have learned is that most students come to us steeped in the anthropology that Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor termed expressive individualism, in which autonomy becomes the highest good to which all other goods are subordinated.” As Roper relates, he and other staff at UD try to counter this viewpoint.

“So we say to students, ‘You’re a member of the dorm community,’ and we work to build that community,” he said.

As for virtue, Roper prefers the word excellence.

“Virtue isn’t being pious,” he said. “It allows you freedom. That’s when you acquire virtue.”

He said of how freshmen are helped toward that goal, “We give them a series of little talks, talks about things like dating, about how to get along.”

In 2023, Roper wrote a short book, “A Life Well-Lived: A Student Guide to an Education of the Whole Person,” which is given to all new UD students. In the foreword are these words: “We educate human beings who want to live well, both professionally and personally; who want to find meaning in their lives; in short, who want to be happy.”

To sum up the best of what students should look for college, Roper concluded, “So a life of reading is the sine qua non of getting an education out of your college, and the second is enjoying the give and take of coming to college and knowing that people from different parts of the country, different ways of life, different family traditions are coming together and enjoying the process.

“That’s where the real education takes place.”