The Essential Handbook for Student Success
Nonfiction, College Guide
Date Published: April 1, 2026
Publisher: Manhattan Book Group
The Definitive Guide for Success in College and Beyond
Finally, a book that actually prepares you for college! Nearly every first-year college student discovers that college courses are more academically challenging than high school. Professors expect you not just to absorb material but to analyze and synthesize it, to consider multiple perspectives, to evaluate conflicting evidence, and then to apply what you've learned in new contexts.
Drawing on a lifetime of experience teaching and advising students, former dean of Academic Advising and associate vice provost at Stanford University Louis E. Newman explains how to do all this, and more. Whatever your background or academic interest, this book will prepare you for college-level learning. Thinking Critically in College is the definitive guide, not only for those in college, but for everyone who needs a refresher on thinking clearly.
"Thinking Critically in College details and exemplifies the differences
between high school and college. Students who read this book before coming to
college will have an advantage over those who don't." -LEE CUBA, professor
emeritus of sociology, Wellesley College, and author of Practice for Life:
Making Decisions in College
"Even students who have taken college-prep and AP courses are unprepared for the type of learning that will take place in college. Thinking Critically in College is poised to help all students at all types of institutions develop the dispositions and skills necessary for success in college." -LYNN PASQUERELLA, president of Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)
Excerpt
A Word to Teachers
All of us who have the responsibility of teaching students, both college-bound high school students and first-year college students, know both the excitement of opening their minds to new ideas and the challenges of teaching them how to think critically. For many of us, trained in specific disciplines and tasked with making that content accessible to our students, we feel the responsibility to focus our efforts on content. There is so much our students need to learn—concepts and vocabulary, methods and theories. If we don’t impart that knowledge in our courses, students will not be prepared for more advanced work in the discipline. There is no time to address more general issues—how to think analytically or quantitatively, much less how to study effectively or to cultivate metacognition.
And yet we know that many (likely, most) beginning college students are clueless about the sort of thinking we expect of them. They pick it up, if at all, by a process of trial and error. The result is mutual frustration—students frustrated that they are unclear what college-level thinking means and how to do it, and faculty frustrated that our students don’t get it. In my view, there is only one way forward: to be explicit about what critical thinking is and how to do it and then to illustrate that in the way we teach, in the assignments we give, and in the feedback we provide them. It is my hope that this book will provide a concise and accessible framework for doing these things, without detracting significantly from the time needed to cover discipline-specific topics.
If you use this book as a text for one of your courses, I encourage you to do so in whatever ways best suit your needs and the needs of your students. The chapters do not need to be assigned in their entirety or in the order in which they appear here. Some may be more relevant to your purposes than others, and some may complement specific units in your course, which dictates when (or whether) you assign them. If you do use the book in its entirety, you will notice that some messages—such as seeking help and thinking critically to identify one’s own biases—are reiterated at multiple points in the text.
It will be apparent that this book is written for an American audience. It assumes the context of American baccalaureate education, and the examples offered are typical of materials that students would encounter in American classrooms. In this regard, I am a product of my own education and of the educational institutions I have worked in. If you are teaching international students or in a non-American institution, you may need to supplement the reading selections with others that are more culturally familiar or be prepared to provide more context than I have here.
Similarly, the questions for reflection that appear at the conclusion of each chapter are meant to be suggestive. I wrote them with the intention that they could serve as brief written reflection assignments. But you may find that there are other prompts that will stimulate your students to practice what they have learned in these pages or to reflect on how they could apply those lessons to their academic work. The goals of these prompts are to help students review the main points covered in that chapter, to reflect on their own learning process, and to consider the ways in which they could apply what they have learned.
As I write this, our country is still dealing with the impact of a two-year period of grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic. Students have been profoundly affected by the altered learning environment they have endured during this period. While I do not believe that these disruptions have changed our goals to teach our students to think critically and creatively about the material we assign them, they have surely affected our students’ readiness to do so. Things we assumed they had learned will likely need to be retaught. The lessons covered here may need to be scaffolded more carefully or introduced more slowly. All this may affect how you choose to use this book as you do the hard work of meeting students where they are. In all, it is my hope that the guide to college-level thinking presented here may be even more timely as students struggle to catch up on the fundamentals they need to succeed in college.
Finally, it is worth remembering that acquiring critical-thinking skills is the work of a lifetime. At best, we lay the foundations for that work—first by explaining that this is a long-term goal of higher education, and then by introducing some of the tools students need and demonstrating how to use them. It would be a disservice to students and to the cause of education to suggest that any single book could inculcate in them all the critical-thinking skills they will use throughout their lives. But we can—and must—show them how these skills are embedded in the work they are asked to do in college and how practicing these skills will serve them well, no matter what careers they choose. In that sense, the goals of this book are modest, even though I believe its purpose is of paramount importance for us as educators.
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