During my freshman year at Middlebury College, I remember a classmate complaining as we walked across campus on a particularly bitter January morning: "I knew it was going to be cold. I just didn't know it was going to be this cold."
She was from Southern California, and the one visit she made to the wilds of Vermont before starting college was in mid-July after her junior year of high school.
For parents who have just returned from schlepping junior all over the country in an effort to narrow down the list of colleges, I have to ask, "What were you thinking?" Summer isn't the time to visit schools, and not just because you won't get a good sense of New England winters. Colleges over the summer are just a bunch of buildings, some lovely landscaping and a few peppy student ambassadors — walking backward, of course.
Why not go visit colleges when classes are actually in session? Admittedly, students spend fewer and fewer hours in class or engaged in academic pursuits (about 25 hours a week, according to the now famous study, "Academically Adrift"). But wouldn't it be good to know something about the way classes are taught anyway?
Good teaching is rarely recognized and almost never rewarded in a way that counts. According to a 2005 study in the Journal of Higher Education, "teaching an additional hour remained a negative factor in pay and publishing an extra article a positive factor in pay."
Students, meanwhile, complain about professors who use the same notes for 20 years, professors who never look up from those notes, and whose grading of papers consists of "great job!" or "needs work." Teaching is rarely supervised by grown-ups. A Harvard professor told me that in her two decades teaching there, not a single colleague or administrator had ever set foot in her class.
How do you find out where your son or daughter can be taught well? First, don't rely on the U.S. News and World Report "Best Colleges" rankings. The formula rewards factors that have nothing to do with teaching.
Assuming students can visit a school when it's in session, what should they look for?
First, they might read the course catalog and then sit in on some classes that they might actually take during freshman year. The admissions office may try to impress visitors with an advanced seminar in constitutional law, taught by a senior professor and capped at 13 students. There is some small chance you will be able to take this class four years from now. But you may first have to sit through an introduction to political science class with 600 students. Why not visit that one instead?
Then, look at who is at the front of the class. Professors often dislike teaching introductory courses. So they may be assigned to someone with little experience teaching, let alone in holding the attention of hundreds of young people in a large lecture hall. Schools that value teaching will make senior professors teach freshmen. But even if they do, the teachers' assistants handle more of the hands-on grading. In an age when you can watch lectures by great professors online, the interactive part of teaching — grading and answering questions — becomes more valuable.
Families who tour schools over the summer can often only ask their guides about these issues. If you go when school is in session, you can ask anyone lounging on the quad. It won't be a scientific survey, yet it might be a more honest one. College tuition is probably the biggest investment a family will make outside of a mortgage. Doing some real homework will pay off.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is author of "The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won't Get the College Education You Paid For." She wrote this for Bloomberg View.