Connections Are Everything

I’ll admit: I rolled my eyes when I saw yet another book about ‘student success.’ But *Connections Are Everything* won me over in the first 20 minutes—not with grand theories, but with Felten’s laser focus on the *how*. Take his breakdown of ‘high-impact practices’ like undergraduate research or learning communities. Instead of vague praise, he dissects why these work (hint: it’s about *structured* vulnerability, not just throwing students together) and how to replicate their magic in a 10-minute advising session or a syllabus tweak. Dixon’s narration helps here; he delivers Felten’s dry humor (like the dig at universities that ‘love collaboration—except when it comes to tenure committees’) with just enough wryness to keep it engaging. The audiobook isn’t perfect. Felten’s skepticism of tech-mediated connections (he’s lukewarm on social media as a tool for belonging) feels dated in a post-pandemic world where hybrid relationships are the norm. And while the production is clean, the lack of interviews or student voices—just Felten’s analysis—sometimes makes the stakes feel abstract. That said, the chapter on ‘mentoring as a two-way street’ (where he argues students often *save* faculty from burnout) is worth the price alone. This isn’t a book to passively absorb; it’s one to pause, argue with, and immediately apply. If you’ve ever left a campus feeling like the ‘real learning’ happened in the dining hall, not the classroom, this will hand you the blueprint to design for that reality.