Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    A Culture of Cybersecurity
    Opportunities in the Hard Sciences
    Career Preparation
Sign In
News

The Power of the Personal

By Daniel F. Chambliss September 15, 2014
The Power  of the Personal 1
David Plunkert for The Chronicle

Under fierce pressure to do more with less, colleges today need improvement strategies that are simultaneously reliable, powerful, available, and cheap. Such methods should consistently work well, clearly repay the effort they require, be usable by almost anyone on campus, and require little time and no additional money (since there probably isn’t much lying around). These are strict criteria, but they are achievable. In particular, there is one step colleges can take right now to engage students, without spending a cent or creating a new program: They can encourage more face-to-face human contact. Such human contact, with its power to grab students’ attention and motivate them, may be the key to workable improvement strategies.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Under fierce pressure to do more with less, colleges today need improvement strategies that are simultaneously reliable, powerful, available, and cheap. Such methods should consistently work well, clearly repay the effort they require, be usable by almost anyone on campus, and require little time and no additional money (since there probably isn’t much lying around). These are strict criteria, but they are achievable. In particular, there is one step colleges can take right now to engage students, without spending a cent or creating a new program: They can encourage more face-to-face human contact. Such human contact, with its power to grab students’ attention and motivate them, may be the key to workable improvement strategies.

In a 10-year longitudinal study of students at a small college, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Christopher G. Takacs and I found that personal relationships with both peers and faculty members, starting from direct contact, were fundamentally important to undergraduate success and could readily be facilitated by institutions. The influence of friends, teachers, and mentors on students’ careers can be truly pervasive, running from start to finish. Especially for traditional-age students at residential colleges, research has shown that friendships are a necessary prerequisite for retention and integration. Research has also shown that peer and professor connections are the central daily motivators for exploring, discussing, studying, and learning, and that relationships of all kinds are often tied to a major positive result. What matters most in college, then, is who meets whom, and when.


NEXT: The Quest for Student Success

Read the full report on innovation in academe, focused on formulas for student success.


Meanwhile, institutions themselves can promote the right sorts of contact through thoughtful dorm design and room assignments, location of faculty offices, scheduling of classes, and deployment of teaching faculty.

Even an apparently minor personal encounter can go a long way in helping a student. For example, one student from our study, who planned to major in psychology, happened to meet a nice Chinese professor at orientation, and two years later was living and studying full time in Beijing. Another met a fellow student in their dorm who was a tutor in the Writing Center and taught him the fundamentals of composition, which the first student’s high school had neglected. When yet another student casually enrolled in an art-history course, she was hooked by the lively professor and found her academic home.

While conducting research for our book, How College Works, we saw how a single meeting with a professor to work through a paper could have a decisive effect on a student’s writing, and how just a single visit to a faculty member’s home could significantly shift a student’s entire vision of the college experience. Time and again, finding the right person, at the right moment, seemed to have an outsize impact on a student’s success—in return for relatively little effort on the part of the college.

Fortunately, as they try to increase students’ contact with engaging professors, colleges are not completely at the mercy of their student-faculty ratios. Even a small number of exciting people and events, properly located, can have a disproportionately positive impact on students’ educational careers. A university in toto may be huge, but any one student has to find only two or three good friends, and one or two inspiring professors, to have a great college experience. The trick is to make sure students find those people.

At the same time, a handful of exciting large courses and great lecturers can still engage large numbers of students. And certainly different professors appeal to, and can help, different students. In one day, a president or dean can “work the crowd” at orientation and inspire countless students, just as a single great lecturer can hold forth to a thousand students in an auditorium, potentially creating an intellectual community that reaches out to the rest of the campus.

The personal touch motivates students at all kinds of institutions, not just smaller or more selective ones. In her book The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another, Rebecca D. Cox studied several dozen community colleges across the country. She found that first-generation and nontraditional students, often hesitant to approach any authority figure, needed their professors to take the initiative in getting to know and understand them. In turn, professors’ caring attitude was vital in helping students meet the challenges of college. Many of George Kuh’s nationally validated best practices in student engagement (such as an emphasis on student research, senior theses, and learning communities) rest on the principle of getting students and professors together closely.

The 2014 Gallup-Purdue Index found that having “a mentor who encouraged my hopes and dreams,” “professors who cared about me,” and “at least one professor who made me excited about learning” made students far more likely to be successful later in life. Even some of the leading providers of online higher education understand the importance of human contact: Southern New Hampshire University’s recent television campaign features a bus traveling the country to hand-deliver diplomas to beaming students, who are delighted to finally meet face-to-face with someone from the university.

When I give talks suggesting that colleges focus more on fostering relationships, some audience member—usually a professor—always asks, “But what about academics?” Academics seem to segregate learning away from life. A scientist at a U.S. News & World Report “top 10" college bemoaned that students in our research cited “making good friends” as a top outcome of higher education—but the scientist later admitted that he himself had been recruited into his department by the “fun” people in it. At another college, a political scientist said, “OK, we run a nice country club, but we don’t need to be mothering, all warm and fuzzy.” A comment on a recent article asked, “Isn’t this … what summer camp is?” Still another said, “I didn’t go to college to make friends—no, I went for an education.”

Those are reasonable reservations, but they miss the point: Without at least workable relationships with peers and teachers, academic education is unlikely to happen at all. Most students do, in fact, care about making friends, and about being respected and encouraged by their teachers. The critics, I think, cling to the old myth of the solitary intellectual. They forget that critical thinking is not an isolated technical skill; it’s a socially embedded way of living, a habitual way of being with other people. It has to be practiced with others; the courage required to participate needs to be modeled.

ADVERTISEMENT

Communication, too, must be rehearsed with real audiences who care enough to listen or to read. Nursing and even engineering really do involve using skills with other people, and in all fields students can and do teach one another. In college I learned about Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Foucault from my fellow undergraduate Paul; about literary criticism from Stan; about 19th-century English history from Polly; and about bicycle repair from Steve. More generally, good relationships with supportive fellow students, caring professors, and helpful staff members in the university can smooth a student’s path to a wide array of social, academic, and career benefits.

It’s not that formal programs, facilities, and funding don’t matter; they do. But at its heart, higher education is a human activity, powered primarily by bringing thinkers together. So rather than attending so much to programs and policies, maybe higher education should focus first on its people, and on helping them find—and eventually care about—one another.

Daniel F. Chambliss is a professor of sociology at Hamilton College. The Chronicle Book Club chose his book How College Works (with co-author Christopher G. Takacs, Harvard University Press, 2014) as its September reading selection.

Read other items in NEXT: The Quest for Student Success.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Illustration showing three classical columns on stacks of coins, at different heights due to the amount of coins stacked underneath
Data
These 35 Colleges Could Take a Financial Hit Under Republicans’ Expanded Endowment Tax
Illustration showing details of a U.S. EEOC letter to Harvard U.
Bias Allegations
Faculty Hiring Is Under Federal Scrutiny at Harvard
Illustration showing nontraditional students: a pregnant worman, a soldier; a working professional; an elderly man; and a woman with an artificial leg
'Unique Needs'
Common App Takes an In-Depth Look at Independent Students
Photo-based illustration of a Sonoma State University clock structure that's fallen into a hole in a $100 bill.
Campus Crossroads
Sonoma State U. Is Making Big Cuts to Close a Budget Hole. What Will Be Left?

From The Review

Solomon-0512 B.jpg
The Review | Essay
The Conscience of a Campus Conservative
By Daniel J. Solomon
Illustration depicting a pendulum with a red ball featuring a portion of President Trump's face to the left about to strike balls showing a group of protesters.
The Review | Opinion
Trump Is Destroying DEI With the Same Tools That Built It
By Noliwe M. Rooks
Illustration showing two men and giant books, split into two sides—one blue and one red. The two men are reaching across the center color devide to shake hands.
The Review | Opinion
Left and Right Agree: Higher Ed Needs to Change
By Michael W. Clune

Upcoming Events

Ascendium_06-10-25_Plain.png
Views on College and Alternative Pathways
Coursera_06-17-25_Plain.png
AI and Microcredentials
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin