Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samuel Eliot Morison traces the roots of American universities back to Europe, providing "a lively contemporary perspective...a realistic picture of the founding of the first American university north of the Rio Grande" [Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune].

Why do some students make the most of college, while others struggle and look back on years of missed deadlines and missed opportunities? What choices can students make, and what can teachers and university leaders do, to improve more students’ experiences and help them achieve the most from their time and money? Most important, how is the increasing diversity on campus—cultural, racial, and religious—affecting education? What can students and faculty do to benefit from differences, and even learn from the inevitable moments of misunderstanding and awkwardness? From his ten years of interviews with Harvard seniors, Richard Light distills encouraging—and surprisingly practical—answers to fundamental questions. How can you choose classes wisely? What’s the best way to study? Why do some professors inspire and others leave you cold? How can you connect what you discover in class to all you’re learning in the rest of life? Light suggests, for instance: studying in pairs or groups can be more productive than studying alone; the first and most important skill to learn is time management; supervised independent research projects and working internships offer the most learning and the greatest challenges; and encounters with students of different religions can be simultaneously the most taxing and most illuminating of all the experiences with a diverse student body. Filled with practical advice, illuminated with stories of real students’ self-doubts, failures, discoveries, and hopes, Making the Most of College is a handbook for academic and personal success.

Bok concludes that the competition for the best students, the most advanced scholarship, the most successful scientific research, the best facilities--has helped to produce venturesome, adaptable, and varied universities. But because the process of learning itself is imperfectly understood, it is difficult to achieve sustained progress in the quality of education or even to determine which educational innovations actually enhance learning.

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Just as Harvard University is a place “where world-class professors, innovative research, and a dynamic student community come together to advance education and foster change in the world”, Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), founded in 1920, grants students and visiting scholars who are determined to “learn to change the world” valuable opportunities to meet great professors and participate in shaping meaningful research. The book’s twenty interviews are organized into five parts: Values and Goals, Development, Media, Student Life and Institutions, and Putting Learning into Practice—Engineering Education. While our team of interviewees consists largely of HGSE professors and administrators, it also includes world-renowned professors and deans from other Harvard schools, as well as an outstanding representative of global engineering education transformation. Each chapter consists of an interviewee profile, editors’ note, the interview dialogue itself, references, and notes, so that our dear readers can experience the impact of the interviewees’ ideas and reliably trace their sources. While each individual interview is an instructive snapshot of a specific area of educational research and practice, we hope that the collection as a whole will enlighten and inspire each of our readers to do their part to improve the world. Contributors are: Jane (Chao) Bai, Joseph Blatt, Jack (Jiajie) Chen, Chris Dede, Catherine Elgin, Tracy Elizabeth, Tianyu Fu, Yidan Gao, Hunter Gehlbach, Paul Harris, Helen Haste, Mingzhu He, Thomas Hehir, Siang Huat (Jason Hong), Arthur Kleinman, Charles H. Langmuir, Stephen Lassonde, Harry Lewis, Yinqi Li, Yi (Elaine) Lin, Jed F. Lippard, Richard K. Miller, Siwen Zhang Minero, Samuel Odamah, Robert L. Selman, Nancy Sommers, Justin M. Thomas, Sonia Maria Pereira Vidigal, Lianjiang Wang, Richard Weissbourd, Gary Yu, Haiqin Yu, Ting Zhang, Jing Zhao, Qiuzi Zhou, Songyu Zhu and Julie.