What the Best College Students Do

“Sure, high marks have their rewards. An excellent academic record can serve anyone well in our society […] but if we had to choose between good grades or deep learning, I’d pick the latter every time.”

It’s better to learn a subject deeply than merely to get good grades on tests. Anyone can learn how to get good grades without really understanding the material, but delving deeply into a subject provides the real benefit—and good grades tend to follow anyway. 

“Everything you create, he told the class, will come from inside you, so you must know yourself. That’s the reason you must write your life story and learn to talk to yourself, to find out what’s inside you, and to discard the parts that are old and stale, and enhance and use the elements of yourself that are unique, beautiful, and useful.” 

Paul Baker’s course Integration of Abilities taught students to learn what makes them tick as individuals, find those aspects of their lives that are most productive and creative, and nurture them. 

“They began to value the creative process as the central core of their own education, and to see that while it could find expression in the arts, it could also appear in a chemical formula, a new way of looking at history, a fresh way of providing medical services, a new surgical method, a cure for cancer, a well-planned park, a creative meal, or even in what you do with your money.” 

In Paul Baker’s class, students did different kinds of unusual art projects, all with a view to understanding the workings of their creative minds. Acting out an idea, or drawing it, or writing it, or clapping it as a rhythm—each activity brought students closer to their own creative process and helped them learn to make productive connections between things and subjects that otherwise seem unrelated.

“Traditional schooling rewards quick answers—the person with the hand up first. But an innovative work of the mind, something that lasts and changes the world, demands slow and steady progress. It requires time and devotion. You can’t tell what you can do until you struggle with something over and over again.”

Mediocre students give up quickly if they struggle at first with a subject, concluding that they don’t have a knack for it. Successful students persist, taking the attitude that they simply haven’t gotten the hang of it yet.

“Our society needs adaptive experts, whether it is to address the ravages of climate change, fix a sagging economy, or end wars, yet strategic learners seldom provide that imaginative flexibility.” 

Strategic learners study to ace the exam and protect their grade point average, but this habit can limit their ability to innovate. Deep learners also know the basics, and they have adaptive ways of looking at problem solving. This ability gives them an advantage in their professional lives and in life as a whole. 

“At an early age, people learn to work for a gold star or a good grade, and, as one of Deci’s colleagues put it, they feel a ‘loss of the locus of control.’ In other words, they feel manipulated. As their sense of being an independent person slips from them, their interests fade beneath an avalanche of ‘requirements’ and ‘assignments.’ They are no longer in charge of their own education. Their childhood curiosity often languishes and dies.” 

External rewards cause students to focus on performance rather than understanding. In time, they no longer think of learning as an exciting challenge. When outside rewards matter, there’s no time for independent thought, curiosity, and exploration. 

“Creative and critically thinking people open a conversation with themselves that allows them to understand, control, and improve their own minds and work.” 

Metacognition, or thinking about thinking, is key to improving how we learn and how best to use our unique viewpoints in acquiring knowledge and skill. 

“A mindful brain pays attention, but that doesn’t mean just staring at something. If I am mindful of some idea, word, event, or object, I’m consciously aware of it, and I think about how I am reacting, about my curiosity, and about how I’m attending to the subject. I turn the matter one way in my mind and then another, looking for new ways of understanding both the object of my attention and the way I’m interacting with it.” 

The mind learns and remembers, but it also conserves effort by getting itself into behavioral ruts. Breaking out of uncreative thought patterns involves deliberately looking at ideas from different perspectives, searching for new insights and new ways of understanding. 

“People who become highly creative and productive learn to acknowledge their failures, even to embrace them, and to explore and learn from them.” 

For successful learners, failure is a way-station, not a terminal. Discovering what not to do often is more important than knowing what works. Failure teaches lessons that can lead, later, to success. 

“If you believe that your value as a human being depends on how well you perform, and you also think that fate has predetermined your ability to do something, you are headed for trouble.” 

To believe both that intelligence is fixed and that social standing depends on that fixed amount of intelligence is to paint oneself into a corner. In fact, intelligence is multi-faceted and can be trained and improved. Successful students focus on growth and development of insights, which deliver many benefits beyond social rank. 

“To believe in solutions is to believe that the world is flexible, that you can change it with effort. That’s a growth mindset.”

A flexible attitude opens up more possibilities than a fixed mindset. Successful people work on projects despite obstacles, changes in luck, or distractions. Their vision of a particular outcome guides them toward the goal. They know they can grow to meet any challenge. 

“At the highest levels […] students can see how something fits into a larger picture. They can take problems and arguments apart and apply general principles to their solution. They can compare and contrast ideas, explain causes, and integrate ideas together. But they can also take the ideas and arguments of one subject and apply them, where appropriate, to something completely different. They can generate new theories from what they know already, and then imagine ways to test their hypothesis.” 

Surface learning leads to a knowledge of facts, but deeper, more complex thought can reveal the many dimensions on which those facts interact and form patterns. This thinking, in turn, often leads to useful and innovative answers. Techniques developed from persistent reasoning on these types of issues can be re-used on other big questions. Among the chief benefits of such efforts are the improved skills and abilities students and professionals bring to any number of problem-solving tasks. 

“You don’t learn from experience; you learn from reflecting on experience.” 

Experience provides us with lots of data about what works and what doesn’t, but it’s up to us to ponder those experiences, glean more general truths from them, and develop useful theories and ideas that transcend mere feedback and empower us with more comprehensive skills and greater wisdom. 

“No one contends that high self-regard hurts your grades and learning. Far from it. It’s the pursuit of this quality through high grades rather than through learning that becomes the match that kindles anxiety, especially when the academic stakes are high. In other words, if you base what you think of yourself on how high your grades are rather than, say, on how kind you may be, how much you learn, how hard you try, or what you contribute to society, then you have a fairly reliable sign of trouble ahead.” 

Self-esteem that grows from learning and wisdom is much more robust than esteem that depends on the latest exam score. A single bad test result can cause self-regard to collapse, whereas a steadily growing mind can be proud of itself every day. 

“To grow on the ideas and creations of others, we must encounter them, and to do so, we must explore the great works of the mind found in the arts, sciences, mathematics, philosophies, and historical perspectives.” 

It’s not enough to learn a well-paying skill. To engage successfully with the fast-changing, dynamic modern world, students must learn from many perspectives and understand the wants and needs of many groups as well as the motives and incentives of the various professions and interest groups that will impinge on their work in the years to come. Instead of being stunned by change, college graduates who study widely and think deeply can enter the world prepared to adapt creatively to the challenges ahead. 

“Imagine that you are trying to see different shades of a color. You can see the difference most clearly if you put them next to each other. So it is with understanding yourself and your own times.” 

Without perspective, a subject appears plain and flat. With perspective, the subject takes on multiple dimensions and becomes deeper and more complex. To see a topic from many angles—from varying fields of study and differing cultural viewpoints—is to see more widely and more wisely. 

“Repeatedly, we heard stories of multidisciplinary expeditions; of conversations late into the night; of lifetimes of reading absolutely everything; of explorations for those insights, ideas, and facts that could feed their brains. We heard in all of that a thirst for knowledge, a quest for originality, and a pervasive concern for justice.” 

A good college education is peppered with discussions, differing viewpoints, critiques, and challenges that inspire a student to think widely, transcend bias, and understand the views and needs of others. These experiences empower the learner with the ability, and the drive, to develop solutions to the problems that plague society. 

“Among the people we studied, we saw the same pattern repeatedly of wanting more than a rote challenge or prestige from their careers. They sought an education that didn’t leave out contemplation or a sense of wonder, even if they had to blaze their own trail.”

The best college students get value well beyond their test grades. They develop a sense of deep curiosity, engagement with complex issues, and wide perspective. These traits, rather than what they’ve memorized, energize their futures. Their success depends much more on their creative, imaginative solutions to complex problems than whether they remember basic facts. 

“No one explanation can capture why our subjects developed such broad interests and pursued vigorously that liberal education for the free person. Ability and success alone cannot explain the choices they made. Although curiosity played a central role, so did a sense of purpose, a devotion to some greater cause, and a concern for a just society. They loved beauty in all its forms, often learned as children the power of stories and the excitement of solving puzzles, and they used their college experience to engage and stimulate their minds.”

A vigorous and never-ending curiosity and love for the world and its knowledge, combined with a compassion for the creatures that inhabit it, form the foundations of learning excellence. Since these qualities arise from many different causes, there’s no reason why anyone can’t acquire them. Once chosen, these attitudes stimulate ongoing education. 

“The decision to specialize didn’t mean turning off all those other interests. Rather it meant using everything they had learned to create in one or two primary areas. Most important, they didn’t define themselves in terms of the profession they pursued, the contraption they invented, or the song they sang, but instead as creative, curious, compassionate, concerned, and caring human beings, citizens of the world.” 

Eventually, students choose majors and focus on the main skill sets they will offer to others. A specialty isn’t an end game but a tool for a larger purpose. The most productive specialists possess a background of wide understanding of the world in which those talents must be applied. A larger perspective improves judgment, which enables people to use their specialties wisely. 

“If you focus exclusively on short-term success or on how famous you want to be with your creativity, you are unlikely to achieve success, creativity, or fame. Our subjects found something in the world that interested them more than themselves. Success and creativity—and sometimes fame—emerged as a by-product of full engagement with the problem or task at hand. You have to care about something and let your passion drive your life.” 

It’s not the grade or the skill or the accolades that make for a great career; it’s the desire to serve and the dedication to a high purpose that give meaning and value to the work. Fame and fortune sometimes visit a life, but the real satisfaction is in the devotion to the quest. 

“For generations, some students have experienced an educational system that emphasizes surface and strategic learning. Indeed, that emphasis has grown in many places. Societies want to know whether students are learning and if education is a worthwhile investment, and they have imposed standardized tests on teachers and students to find out the answers. Those tests change everything, often encouraging everyone to emphasize rote memorization rather than understanding.”

Pressure to learn quickly and superficially, then get a job and start paying back student loans, puts into the background the true purpose of higher education: a more rounded personality and deeper perspective. For many students, it’s hard to look beyond current financial concerns and to risk engagement with the real benefits of higher education. 

“It takes enormous courage and dedication to take control of your own education and achieve the goals discussed in this book. Yet it is probably the only approach that makes any sense of the college experience, and certainly the one most likely to bring you self-satisfaction.” 

Even today, many educators believe knowledge is an accretion of facts. True education, though, is more about thinking than memorizing, and the development of the mind’s powers is the one prize truly worth attaining in college.