A couple of years back Ken Bain wrote What The Best College Teachers Do, a book which was widely read, even by people who don’t normally read books on how to teach. One person who didn’t read it was me. So when Bain’s follow-up What The Best College Students Do came out, I decided to take a look and see what the fuss was all about. I agree strongly with Bain’s argument — I do think college students who follow his advice will be successful — but the book was hardly a home run for me. If you are a college student, then you might care for it more than I did.

You don’t have to read Bain’s book for too long before you get a sense of how it’s put together: Every chapter focuses on a single habit or attribute that, according to Bain, a good college student should have. The chapter then explains why cognitive psychologists and education researchers think you need that quality, and exemplifies that quality through stories of inspiring students who go on to be successful.

Its really as simple as that. The introductory chapter argues that ‘deep’ rather than surface learning is important. The second chapter says that people learn best when they do it for learning’s intrinsic rewards (rather than ‘extrinsic’ rewards, like good grades). Chapter three describes cognitive biases that should be avoided (this is actually a raft of different good habits to learn, not just one). Chapter four focuses on the importance of being able to learn from failure. Chapter five stresses the importance of recognizing that often in life there are no easy answers, while chapter six focuses on self-esteem and ‘self-compassion’ and their role in student success. Chapter seven, one of my least favorites, is on the importance of the ‘liberal arts’. The final chapter differs from the others in providing concrete advice on how to study, write, chose classes, and so forth.

At a certain level, it’s hard not to like Bain’s book — who doesn’t think that students should have self-esteem? I mean, he’s right. Clearly. And the book is written in an engaging, easy-to-read form. In fact at times it reads more like a Web 2.0 business book than an academic text. And yet there are problems.

First, the book is absolutely smothered in inspiring stories. At first, you feel inspired when you read them. After the fifth inspiring story you start to get bored. After the fifteenth you wonder whether the book couldn’t have been shorter. Some of the inspiring stories are truly remarkable: chapter two includes a section of Stephen Colbert’s life story which is really quality. Others inspiring stories neatly exemplify the characteristics that are the subject of his chapter, so it makes sense that they are featured. But then there are the others… the ones that are supposed to enliven the book by starting each chapter off with a bang, but which really are just three extra pages to wade through until you get to Bain’s actual point. The stories that are only loosely connected to the topic at hand, but seem to be included because they are so inspiring. For some people, these stories might be the heart of the book. For me, however, the just got in the way too much of the time.

I’ll say something else about these stories as well: they are disgustingly, almost parodically filled with liberal, latté-swilling self-satisfaction. I can almost see Ken Bain driving his hybrid car to campus, NPR playing softly in the background, as he reflects with wonder on yet another inspiring student who looked inside themselves to find a creative vision which they used to make the world — and themselves, gosh darnnit, themselves — a better place. Even a latté-swilling liberal like myself who shares Bain’s decadent academic lifestyle will find the plush, care bear like tone of some of the more heartfelt passages a tad cloying. Sometimes — for instance in his discussion of brain anatomy — his vivid, popularizing style made me feel he was talking down to me. I’m guessing that smart college students might feel the same way.

I do agree with him. I listen to NPR. I swill lattés (ok actually I drink normal-person coffee but you know what I mean). But if you come from a strict methodist family that believes sobriety and integrity are key to education, or if you are attending a Jesuit college where a student owes their teacher something, then this vision of education might not be up your alley. His vision, in sum, seems culture-bound to me. This is not a book about how rote memorization of Chinese characters a way to immerse yourself in a rich tradition that began ten thousand years ago and continues with you. But the scientistic slant of the writing seems to suggest that there is a natural way to learn, and then many unnatural ways to not learn. As an anthropologist, it’s my job to point out the limitations of this approach.

There is also the issue of Bain’s research. Throughout the book, and especially in the first chapter, Bain seems to frame What The Best College Students Do as presenting the findings of his research on, well, what the best college students do. But as you read the book you don’t actually see him actually studying what college students do. Instead, the book is a secondary source on other people’s research on learning, combined with a series of interview with unusual and inspiring people who Bain seems to have stumbled across at, say, a TED conference.

There’s nothing wrong with summarizing the existing literature and spicing it up with inspiring stories. But I do feel like there is a little bit of bait and switch going on in the book — I had the idea going into What The Best College Students Do that Bain had studied college students, discerned who got good grades versus the ones who actually learned something, measured what constituted ‘best’ in their performance, and then correlated that with their life chances after college. Like, I was under the impression that Bain actually knew what the best college students do. That is not actually what is going on in this book.

Bain’s reliance on newest-latest research also got up my nose a little. I know he had to limit the scope of the book and couldn’t possibly cover all of the vast literature on education. I know. But didn’t we know anything about education before cognitive psychology? In a book that focuses so much on crafting the whole person, a remarkable amount of time is spent describing thinking.  The occasionally artist or athlete crops up, but Ken Bain is not Mike Rose — embodied knowledge is not on the menu here.

Neither, interestingly, are any of the wider debates about what education is for. The chapter on the liberal arts does a superb job of evading any sort of sustained position on what the liberal arts are (in fact, it fits awkwardly into the chapter). Does ‘liberal arts’ mean ‘distribution requirements’ are good or else we will be too narrowly specialized? Does it mean ‘the great books’ of the Western tradition? Does it mean ‘the best that has been thought and said’ across all cultures (a more multicultural approach than a great books position, but one which tends to rely on a romantic fetishization of genius)? How much of the liberal arts should be dedicated to training the body (i.e. Deep Springs) versus just the mind (i.e. the University of Chicago)? How explicitly should moral values be instilled in a liberal arts tradition (Wabash) or should students be given ridiculous amounts of leeway (Reed)? These are live questions in places that really care about teaching, but despite all the inspiring stories (or perhaps because of them) Bain manages to avoid engaging these debates. The result is a book that is both incredibly normative but also strangely unrooted in any sort of explicit educational paradigm.

In sum, What The Best College Students Do is an utterly readable summary of what college professors want to see in their students. It’s a great way to orient yourself to a college experience if you are headed to college, and if you are a teacher it’s a great resource to help you make explicit (and justify) the qualities you seek to cultivate in your students. If you are looking for an original research contribution, or if you have not drunk Ken Bain’s flavor of kool-aid, then the endless stories of student success that fill this volume might not be your cup of tea.