Word: first-years
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...This year TIME recognizes four institutions with highly effective programs to help first-year students make a successful transition into college life. Helping new students survive has, in our judgment, become an essential responsibility of every college. That task takes on new urgency this year, as the children of baby boomers swell the freshman classes of many universities to record numbers in a dorm-bursting wave that won't peak until the end of the decade...
...training faculty to mentor and support new students; --creating first-year seminars, orientation courses and intimate "learning communities;" --teaching students organizational and study skills; and --arranging dorms so that freshmen live among students with similar academic interests...
...First-year seminars have entered the higher-education mainstream, with 71% of the more than 4,000 accredited U.S. campuses offering such courses. About 85% of freshmen take them, and the survival rate of students who take the courses is 3% to 10% better than that of students who do not. These courses often provide the basis for cohesive learning communities, which spark intellectual confidence among their members. At Drury University in Missouri, for instance, orientation groups of 20 students meet with a faculty mentor three times a week during freshman year to analyze the ideas that shape life...
...William Jewell College. That's because this 1,400-student Baptist liberal-arts school in Liberty, Mo., has caulked up every crevice where a newcomer might stumble. Jewell's mentor program reaches out to incoming students even before they pack their bags. Its introductory freshmen seminar has all the first-year students highlighting their copies of St. Augustine's Confessions on the same night. And the college assigns all newcomers as many as five contacts--two faculty members and three students--to check on their adjustment...
Eliminating the sulk factor is exactly the point of the school's interventionist efforts to nurture newcomers, says Kathy Sheppard Nasteff, 36, the dean for first-year students. She is one of the two faculty contacts for each freshman; the other is the student's academic adviser. "These young adults are entering a whole new world," says Nasteff. "We want to help them find an immediate comfort zone." It seems to be working. Since the mentor program started four years ago, retention rates at Jewell have risen to 86%, from...