A History of First-Year Experience Programs

As the first-year college experience is a lot of the discussion here at eighteen and life, I thought you may appreciate a little historical reference.

College orientation, or programming focused on the student adjustment to the new academic environment, is recognized as the precursor to first-year experience programs. Early programs grouped students by housing and assigned advisers to guide new students in their education quest. Johns Hopkins University had formed a system of faculty advisors by 1877 and Harvard University had a board of freshman advisors on record in 1889 (Gordon, 1989). First-year seminar courses were later added to the early orientation structure to more fully develop the first-year experience. A first-year course initiated at Boston University in 1888 is recognized as one of the first organized orientation courses while the first orientation course for credit originated at Reed College in 1911 (Gordon, 1989). More than 82 first-year courses were available by 1925-26 with topics ranging from adjustment to college, study skills, current events, citizenship, and reflective thinking. A third of all colleges and universities offered these courses in the 1930’s and by 1948 a survey reported that 43% of institutions had required orientation courses in the curriculum (Gordon, 1989).

Faculty objections to course credit for non-academic orientation courses soon led to the downfall in their offering and fewer courses could be found on the college campuses of the middle to latter half of the 20^th century. The political unrest of the 1960’s and early 1970’s resulting in campus demonstrations and protests led to an even wider divide between students and universities. The University of South Carolina is credited with acknowledging this rift and initiating a plan to link students with the university in the first-year. This led to resurgence in the popularity of the first-year seminar and other first-year student programming (Saunders and Romm, 2008). In addition to addressing the needs of new direct from high school students, first-year programs also attended to the “new college student” as students transitioned from individuals of financial means to more adult, first-generation, and less-academically prepared students. Higher education professionals again “sought ways of helping freshmen make the transition from high school or work to the college environment” (Gordon, 1989, p. 188).

Throughout the 1980’s, first-year experience courses and programs grew and evolved as institutions gave consideration to the transition experience of a growing diverse student population. Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, Whitt & Associates (2005) reported that many of the DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practice) institutions are skilled at guiding transitions for student success in college and frequently require first-year experience courses or provide additional programs and activities that serve this function. First-year programs including summer orientation through seminar courses are now widely ingrained on the college and university campus and are promoted as important retention strategies common in the student transition to college.

Gordon, V. N. (1989). Origins and purposes of the freshman seminar. In M. L. Upcraft, J. N. Gardner, and Associates (Eds.), The freshman year experience: helping students survive and succeed in college. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kuh, G. D., Kinzie, J. Schuh, J. H., Whitt, E. J., & Associates (2005). Student success in college: creating conditions that matter. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Saunders, D. F. & Romm, J. (2008). An historical perspective on first-year seminars. In B. F. Tobolowsky & Associates, 2006 National Survey of First-Year Seminar: Continuing innovations in the collegiate curriculum (Monograph No. 51, pp. 1-4). Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition.

Gridiron Challenge and Support

Nevitt Sanford (1967) developed his theory for student development based on providing a balance of challenge and support. Too much support with too little challenge creates a cushy environment for the student, where development is unlikely to occur. However, the opposite of too little support with too much challenge also makes development an impossible and negative experience.

One of the "other duties as assigned" in which our dean of students office staff has the opportunity to participate is football game duty. We partner with the athletics department in an effort to keep the student seating section a safe and fun place to enjoy the game. Each home game, a few staff sign up to attend the game and join our students in the stadium. We arrive before the gates open and greet students who stand in line for hours to race down the stadium steps for a seat in the front row. When seated, we distribute wristbands to the students who made it to the front so that they are able to maintain those seats throughout the game.

Our students are big fans. For the most part, if you have been standing in line for four or five hours, you haven't been taking part in other extracurricular activities that historically take place prior to a football game. So, we work the crowds, meeting students, helping with body paint, and taking photos for students posing with the school mascot.

I call it friend-raising. It gets us out with the people that really count, our students. The ones that we want to be successful and graduate from the university. It's also about providing support and encouraging students to make good choices. Because that is what we do in student affairs.

Photo note: Yes, that is a photo of someone in the stadium press box today with a copy of Student Development in College. Yes, he may be an even bigger student affairs geek than me. I never take my books to the game.

Sanford, N. (1967). Self & society: social change and individual development. New York, NY: Atherton Press.

Second star to the right and straight on till morning

The flying public had a bit of a scare last week when it was discovered that a flight from San Diego to Minneapolis overflew it's destination by 150 miles and was out of radio contact for 90 minutes. The pilots were apparently engrossed in a new scheduling software on their laptops. Their lapse in judgment cost them their pilot licenses and will likely result in the loss of their jobs.

At about the same time the media was publicizing the revocation of licenses, I was boarding a United Airlines jet in Denver, bound for a meeting in Los Angeles. Shortly after the cabin doors closed, the pilot, Captain Berner, could be seen making his way though the plane. Any frequent flier knows that this is a bit unusual directly before departing the gate.

Captain Berner stopped to chat with passengers every few rows discussing the turbulence we would likely encounter in route and our estimated flight time. He joked that we would make it to L.A. in two hours where as if we had decided to go by horseback, it would take us six months. After traveling through all the rows, he headed back to the cockpit to get us up in the air.

A quick survey of the passengers in my vicinity confirmed that none of us had ever had a pilot welcome after boarding any plane. So what was this? Likely, it was an United Airlines email memo to pilots on restoring trust with the flying public that had just been circulated. Cynicism aside, it had us smiling and perhaps just a bit more confident that we would arrive at our appropriate destination.

What have you done to reassure your students today?

All it takes is faith and trust and a little bit of pixie dust. ~Peter Pan

A Year of Reflections on the First-Year Experience

Thanks for joining me this past year at Eighteen and Life for reflections on the first-year college experience and building a career on the wisdom of 18-year olds. Today, this blog is one year old. Although my work in student affairs is certainly not exclusive to first-year students, they are the students with whom I spend the majority of my time. The transition to any college or university can be a challenge. Each day, I get to help ease that transition in my little corner of the higher education world. We've come a long way.

The word freshman first appeared in the English language in 1550, when it was used to describe a newcomer or a novice in any field of endeavor. Only in the 1590's did the word come to have specific reference to first-year students in an English university. The term was carried over to America in the next century. The first American freshmen, of course, were at Harvard. Harvard also inaugurated the first system of freshman counselors to ease the young man's transition from home to college. ~John Orr Dwyer in The Freshman Year Experience

Catch and Release

The story of an Italian family who so smothered the social growth of their 12-year old boy that they are now being charged with child abuse was featured in Time Magazine this week. The boy had the motor skills of a toddler and had been so overprotected that that he could not mentally or physically keep up with children his own age. The article also cited a recent psychological study finding that 37% of Italian men from the ages of 30 to 34 still live with their mothers. Which makes me think that perhaps the hovering helicopter parents that we encounter in U.S. higher education are not all that bad.

In my student affairs work with first-generation college students and their families, I am frequently reminded of the Chinese Proverb,

Give a person a fish, and you feed them a day. Teach a person to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime.

Parents will call or email with questions regarding a program, service or special campus event. They are not seeking information for themselves; they are questions for their student. Although the intent is well meaning, I will generally invite parents to have their student contact me. My reasoning is that it is critically important for students to build their own networks of resources, on campus and in life. The “teach a person to fish” proverb is essential in all matters related to a college education. There is a lot to think about for an 18-year old in the transition to college. Parents and families need to set the teaching example, not just do the job for students.

Eighteen and Life: NASPA Website to Watch

Celebrate good times! Tooting my horn that Eighteen and Life was featured among Websites to Watch in the Fall 2009 edition of Leadership Exchange, a NASPA publication. As the first anniversary of this blog approaches, it's flattering to know that others find value here. I look forward to sharing more with you in the months to come. Thanks for reading!

The Dreaded 'P' Word: How Productive Are We?

The Dreaded 'P' Word: An Examination of Productivity in Public Secondary Education seeks to identify common indicators for determining productivity among institutions of higher education. Using an analysis of available funding resources, including state appropriations and tuitions revenues, in comparison to the production of graduates, author Patrick J. Kelly ranks the states based upon their ability to graduate students with degrees that have value in their state. Kelly’s argument for this research is that little progress has been made at the state level to gauge the return on investment in postsecondary education in comparison to other states. The report seeks to provide a productivity measure that is comparable across institutions.

This report highlighted an area that is lacking in higher education assessment, the ability to adequately measure states’ return on investment in postsecondary education. Kelly states that higher education is “not equipped with a wide variety of productivity measures that are directly comparable across institutions." He adds that institutional missions may contribute to the lack of measurability and acknowledges that graduation rates may vastly differ based upon the socio-economic status of the student population. Kelly’s conclusion of the research is most telling in that “there is no evident relationship at the state level between resources and performance.” Some of the best performing states have the lowest resources, while some of the least productive have the largest resources.

Kelly suggests that it is important for states and systems of postsecondary education to identify benchmarks for productivity because only then can productivity be measured between states. At the same time he encourages more analysis of productivity levels of education so that overall productivity can be measured among states and against other countries. The report suggests that it should be an impetus for more research in postsecondary education, a beginning to the conversation that must occur about degree production based upon available resources.

How institutions spend resources and the outcomes they achieve require measurement if we are to continue advancing our postsecondary education systems. If institutions focus on indirect goals of productivity such as increasing graduation rates as opposed to increasing graduation rates in fields of study resourceful within the state, we will continue to be a nation challenged in this arena. In higher education, we cannot be afraid to seek the funding that is essential to support our students and institutions, but we must be willing to identify why it is needed.