Choosing a college is a major family decision. What is the right college? Can you afford it? What should one study for happiness and success?

College guidebooks offer an astounding array of facts and figures, admissions brochures portray the college experience in glowing Kodachrome—but what is the modern college really like? What is it reasonable to expect from a college versus a university, from the liberal arts, from the promise of good teaching and close student/faculty contact?

What to Expect from College analyzes the modern college, its advertised virtues, and the insider guidebooks. George Dennis O'Brien has been a dean at Princeton and Middlebury, president at Bucknell and Rochester; he offers a view from the inside and the topside. Drawing on thirty years of administrative experience as well as a long career as a classroom teacher of philosophy, President O'Brien illuminates the reality behind the rah-rah.

For all its Gothic trimmings, higher education in America is a radically modern invention. Unfortunately, all too many students and families choose colleges for their archaic architecture, not their program of study. President O'Brien cuts through the romance of ivy-covered walls to the rational bases for assessing the college experience. In a witty and insightful fashion, What to Expect from College explores all aspects of universities and colleges and suggests how one might adapt to everything on the contemporary campus from fraternities to grades, from sex to the liberal arts. It is a book for anyone who wants to understand and make the most of contemporary higher education.