Consider this shocking stat as you shop for a college: Fully one-third of freshmen don’t return for sophomore year. And only 61 percent of undergraduates get a degree within six years.
So your guidance counselor isn’t kidding when she says your job is to find a college that’s a great fit for you. Not your parents, not your friends — you. But you also might want to check out what schools of interest are doing to make themselves “sticky.”
The goal “is to get students connected,” says Martha McCaughey, a sociology professor and faculty coordinator of the required first-year seminar at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. The semesterlong discussion-based class pairs small groups of freshmen with faculty members teaching a topic they are passionate about.
The reasons students drop out or transfer run the gamut, of course — from family issues and money problems to loneliness and academic struggles. Some can’t be overcome. But research has shown that creating bonds “both academically and socially” is key to success in college, says Alexander McCormick, director of the annual National Survey of Student Engagement and an associate professor at Indiana University–Bloomington.
Schools are adding “high-impact practices” shown to get students pumped up about their studies and help them connect with peers and professors, from service-learning classes that incorporate volunteer work to internships to undergraduate research. These practices, along with a move to make advising “intrusive” (read: unavoidable), are worth looking for in your college search.
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Last year’s NSSE survey of nearly 335,000 freshmen and seniors at 568 schools revealed that freshmen who participated in at least one high-impact practice were more likely to say they’d choose the same school again.
Retention and graduation rates certainly merit comparison. If schools on your short list have a low freshman retention or graduation rate, it’s smart to ask the admissions office why.
And ask for details about programs aimed at bringing the rates up. Many schools can say they’ve added these practices, but “the quality varies a lot,” cautions Debra Humphreys, vice president for policy and public engagement at the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
The homesickness and rocky adjustment to college-level work many freshmen face can be eased by ” first-year experiences” like the seminars at ASU and others that regularly mix small groups of students and faculty to engage in critical inquiry, writing and collaborative learning.
Some institutions, including Ohio State University, Syracuse University in New York, Elon University in North Carolina and Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, emphasize “learning communities” for freshmen (older students, too), in which groups of students who share an interest take two or more linked classes together and get to know one another and their professors well.
Many of these schools stretch the concept into “living-learning communities,” so that classmates who study together live together, too. The University of Maryland offers 25 to 30 such residential options, for example, focused around themes ranging from social change to women in engineering; about half of the 4,000 freshmen join one.
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Building community service into the course work is another method that a whole range of schools, including Brown University in Rhode Island, the University of Michigan and James Madison University in Virginia, are using to engage students. A sociology class might operate a food pantry, for example; an architecture class might design a green community center.
By supplementing material covered in class with a team effort to actually solve problems in the community, service-learning courses help make “what’s happening in the textbooks come alive,” says Richard Guarasci, president of Wagner College in New York City, a liberal arts school considered a leader in the practice.
Academic frustration can certainly derail the best-laid plans, so many schools are greatly strengthening their advisory systems and revamping remedial education. It’s become common for faculty members teaching first-year seminars to also take on advisory duties for students in the class, for example.
At Arizona State University, eAdvisor, an online system, maps the route to a degree and sends out an alert if a student loses his or her way. Challenging core classes are required sooner rather than later — an electrical engineering major must take calculus in the first term, for example — to minimize the odds of changing majors too late to finish college on time. Anyone who gets off track for any reason can’t enroll for classes before meeting with his or her adviser, who also gets an alert to meet with the student.
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Traditional remedial programs, which require noncredit refresher work in the basics before allowing on-level classes, are in some cases being replaced with “corequisite” remediation that provides extra instruction along with the regular course work.
“It can be as simple as math that takes place five times a week instead of three,” says Tom Sugar, senior vice president of Complete College America, which advocates corequisite remediation as one way to boost college completion and close attainment gaps.
This story is excerpted from the U.S. News “Best Colleges 2015” guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.
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