For those of us long past the university years, it’s hard to remember how rocky the transition can be from high school to college. It is often true that students are leaving behind a safe and familiar world, the only world they’ve ever known— friends, neighborhood, family, even pets — and embarking on the first steps toward genuine autonomy in a new city or state. It is a profound leap. All of a sudden, they are being faced with the expectation that they will manage their own lives, and make decisions about their future, without the reassuring familiarity of their childhood environment close at hand.
At Fairfield we have given a lot of thought to how critical this step is, and what we can do as a University to make sure that our first-year students are made to feel at home. In fact, we have developed a four-year developmental model for how we approach the entire arc of the lives of our undergraduates. While we see this developmental model as an organic and flexible one, basically the way we imagine the Fairfield experience is that in their first year, we do what we can to help our students find their place in the University community. In their second year, we expect our students to begin the process of vocational exploration — in other words, “Who am I and what do I want to do with my skills and talents?” In their third year, we encourage our students — who are now comfortable with who they are and where they are — to give back to the community as a student leader, as an intern, by volunteering in a service learning program or studying abroad. Finally, in their senior year, we ask our students to engage in a reflective process of discernment, to process what they have learned and how they have grown and prepare themselves for the next stage of their lives.
But the foundation of developmental model — and essential to its success — is the notion of Fairfield University as a community. We have put a lot of programs in place to try and develop that sense of community for our incoming students. In fact, the process begins before classes begin — with freshman orientation programs that bring our students together in fun and engaging ways so that they already feel that they have made a friend or two before they arrive on campus.
If our students don’t feel that they have a place in the community, and feel secure in their place, then the subsequent development steps will be more difficult.
Two recent articles, on in Inside Higher Education and the other in The Chronicle of Education, illustrate why this emphasis on building community on campus in the early phases of an undergraduate education are so critical. In Inside Higher Education, Bryan Matthews [link] writes that of the 2.8 million first-year college students each year, more than 450,000 do not return to the college or university that they started with in their second year. In other words, 25 percent of first-year students do not feel they have found their place, and either move on to another school or drop-out altogether. Certainly, there may be good reasons for a student to move elsewhere to a place where they feel they will be better suited, but it must also be true that many of those students are so discouraged by their experience — by the feeling that they don’t belong — that they don’t return at all, or move on to a circumstance that will not necessarily provide them with the best possible environment. Obviously, for universities and colleges, this retention issue also has financial implications. It makes sense for us to look very closely at the freshman experience and do what we can to make sure that nobody is slipping through the cracks. Matthews concludes that the “call” is for universities to “redefine the orientation and preparation process for first-semester students, and to commit sufficient resources to preparing their newest clients for success prior to their arrival on campus,” a call that I think we at Fairfield have heard and are striving to respond to.
But what of those students who come to a campus, don’t feel like they fit in, and move to another school? Well, in a recent article by Ben Terris in the The Chronicle of Higher Education it seems that transfer students have a more difficult time ever feeling like they are fully engaged in their college education. A study by the National Survey of Student Engagement found that “transfer students tended to lag behind ‘native’ students, as it calls those who did not transfer, in terms of campus engagement.” Transfer students seem less likely to study abroad, or take internships for instance. They report less satisfaction in general and are move likely to avoid leaderships experiences. The director of the study, Dr. Alexander McCormick of Indiana University in Bloomington concludes from the data that a large number of these transfer students “were not able to succeed in making good relationships at their first college.”
Whatever the implications, it is clear that building a campus community, and making sure that everyone is engaged and encouraged to find their place in that community as early as possible, is a critical step in ensuring that students get the most out of their college experience.
