Practice For Life: Making Decisions in College by Lee Cuba et al. (review)

It has been said that there is nothing more American than the liberal arts college. In these residential learning communities, students' lives are shaped through seminar-style courses, nightly lectures and concerts, vibrant co-curricular offerings, and curricula that foreground cross-disciplinary connections over purely vocational training. Selective private liberal arts colleges enroll fewer than 5% of U.S. undergraduates, but attending such an institution enhances a student's odds of graduating in four years, studying abroad, winning fellowships, and earning a doctorate (Astin, 1999). The experiences of students at elite colleges merit further investigation. It is hard to pinpoint where and how student transformation and learning actually hap-pens in a "comprehensive, seamless, and relevant environment" when "education takes place around the clock and in all venues" (McCardell, 2014, pp. 173, 178). The holistic benefits of a liberal arts education are a cumulative achievement—adding up to more than the sum of their parts. Taking on this grand and worthy challenge, in Practice for Life: Making Decisions in College, scholar-practitioners Lee Cuba, Nancy Jennings, Suzanne Lovett, and Joseph Swingle provide a readable and nuanced glimpse into the lives of students at some of the nation's most storied and revered New England liberal arts colleges.

The book begins with the claim that "becoming liberally educated is a complex and messy process involving making decisions and learning from them" (p. 2). This idea is richly illustrated with data gathered during an ambitious, longitudinal, mixed-method, multi-institution research project carried out at Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Middlebury, Smith, Trinity, and Wellesley. Although the institutions share similar institutional characteristics and are guided by similar educational philosophies, they each possess unique cultures and policies. To define a concept as diffuse as how students experience college—a single survey or brief interview would provide an incomplete snapshot. By interviewing upwards of 200 students ten times during their college careers, conducting focus groups, and analyzing campus survey data, the researchers plumb the depths of this "complex and messy process" from the inside out. From this ambitious and robust data set, the authors identify clear narratives and themes. While the process may be complex and messy, the prose and arguments are straightforward. The analysis is clear and richly illustrated with quotes from individual students, destined to appeal to a broad readership, including current campus administrators, parents of current and future college students, employers, and liberal arts college graduates.

The central argument of the book is that residential liberal arts colleges provide ample opportunities for students to work toward acquiring five habits of mind that lead to post-graduate fulfillment and success. Each of the habits—managing one's time, connecting with others, creating a "home" of one's own, seeking out advice, and deciding whether and how to become engaged—is explored in a chapter. Recognizing that there is no one right way to perform any of these actions, Cuba et al. embrace two meanings of the verb "to practice," a word prominently featured in the book's title. On the one hand, the authors recognize that these colleges provide a safe, supportive, and low-stakes environment for students to try out strategies that they will use in their post-graduate lives. Students point out that their relative success or failure in each of these five habits often resulted in whether they "thrived, struggled, or stalled" (preface, n.p.) in college overall. On the other hand, the authors implicitly embrace a second meaning of the verb to practice—the way one practices law, medicine, or even yoga—always working toward improvement and greater proficiency without fully achieving perfection. In this, the authors claim that liberal arts colleges provide ample opportunities for students to hone their natural proclivities—always working toward a more perfect version of themselves. The students in the study viewed college as a time to master the foundational skills of adulthood, how to make decisions, how...