Educator Asks Colleges to Take Fresh Look at Helping Freshmen

Do you remember your first year of college? If you were typical of most freshmen, you’ve probably tried to forget those memories of feeling lost and alone--overwhelmed in a maze of new responsibilities without anyone to show you the ropes.

That is changing, though, because of a growing movement among colleges and universities to improve the freshman-year experience. Leading that movement is John N. Gardner, 43, a self-appointed spokesman for what he calls “the largest educational minority” in the country--namely, 3 million American college freshmen.

Why this new attitude?

“If colleges don’t start making more of a commitment to their freshmen, they’ll go somewhere else,” Gardner said last week at the second annual Western Conference on the Freshman Year Experience, held at the Irvine Hilton. The conference was co-hosted by UC Irvine and the University of South Carolina, where Gardner has established the National Center for the Study of the Freshman Year Experience.

“With increasing competition among colleges for a declining pool of eligible students,” Gardner said, “universities need to hold on to the students they have.

“In the best of all possible worlds,” Gardner told the gathering of 450 educators from around the country, “freshmen would be treated with respect and dignity. They would not be hazed. They would take courses from some of the best faculty, be provided with conscientious advising and career planning, be introduced to campus resources, taught some basic college survival skills and know that the leadership of their university has made a commitment to helping them succeed. A good freshman-year experience is when students are told in advance what they’re going to get, and then the institution takes concrete steps to deliver what’s been promised.”

Another important responsibility of colleges, Gardner believes, is to identify all the potential variables that can interfere with a student’s success and then make sure they’ve responded to those variables--for example, making sure students know how to take notes, use the library and learn healthy life styles, and then educating them to make informed and intelligent choices.

For most universities, initiating some of these concepts would mean unlearning a lot of attitudes fostered in graduate schools--that undergraduates aren’t really very important, particularly freshmen, because they have the least knowledge and therefore the least status.

“People should be respected for their potential to acquire knowledge, and the fact that they don’t have it yet is not entirely their responsibility,” Gardner said. “What counts is what they do after they get to college, not what they hadn’t done before.”

Still, the reality for most freshmen today, Gardner said, is that they are more likely to be given the worst housing, if any, the last registration and offered courses taught by inadequately trained undergraduate teaching assistants. This subtle form of hazing, he said, may partially account for the nation’s high college dropout rate of 40%.

“What we’re trying to do is reverse an 800-year-old tradition that the entering college student has no dignity. They were not worthy of respect and so they had to be put through a series of ritualistic practices that humiliated them. The thesis behind this was that if you take a new group of arrivals and oppress them, you generate cohesiveness and esprit de corps. The problem is that if we take these students and hassle them, they’ll go somewhere else, and most colleges can no longer afford to lose their students.”

Gardner has been interested in freshmen since he began teaching at the University of South Carolina in 1970. That same year, his school created the first freshman orientation course, University 101, a three-credit, one-semester course designed to teach freshmen some basic college survival skills, such as study techniques, constructive ways to relate to peers and professors and how to use college resources. Since then, and especially in the last few years, the course has been copied hundreds of times. A survey conducted by the American Council on Education indicates that approximately 80% of the nation’s colleges and universities now have some form of freshman orientation program.

Gardner was asked to administer the University 101 program, and after seven years in that role he said he thought it was time to gather other educators to share their knowledge on the freshman-year experience. In 1982, the University of South Carolina hosted the first National Conference on Freshman Orientation Course.

“We felt there was increasing interest in programs for first-year students and, beyond that, a concern for retention,” Gardner said. “Higher education had expanded tremendously because of generous federal loans, and then after the 1981 recession enrollments declined. The number of high school graduates peaked in 1981, and suddenly universities were asking where they were going to get students. When 3,000 colleges are competing for a smaller group of students, there’s a lot more interest in retention.”

Horace Mitchell, vice chancellor for student affairs at UCI, attended the conference two years ago but not because of student retention problems. Last fall, UCI had to reduce its freshman class by 400 to stem overcrowding.

“We (at the university) were concerned that we weren’t paying the level of attention that we needed to pay to the quality of the freshman-year experience,” Mitchell said. “We wanted to hear what other people around the country were doing, to give us some insights so that we could bring them back to UCI.”

Following that conference, the two universities decided to co-sponsor the first Western Conference, which was held in Irvine last year.

Also last year, UCI initiated its first freshman orientation course, which is now called “Freshman Challenge.”

“The students we targeted are all commuter students,” explained Mara Weisman-Affre, director of off-campus student services. “About 75% of our students live off campus, as do 50% of our incoming freshmen, because we can’t accommodate them in the residence halls. We wanted to reach out to those students who are new but who also live off campus to help them feel part of the campus and let them know that the university cares about them.

“We don’t want them just to come to school, eat their lunch in their car or find a place by themselves, but know that there is a place for them,” she said. “We also wanted to give them information about what’s available to them. It’s different in the residence halls because there are lots of organized activities there, but commuters don’t have that tie. We wanted them to feel that they’re not alone.”

The Freshman Challenge is run by university staffers who volunteer their time to lead groups of 10 to 15. Last fall, 175 of the 1,100 incoming freshmen participated in weekly discussion groups.

“We left a lot of flexibility up to the leaders to decide what types of things they wanted to cover,” Weisman said. Topics have included study skills, how to get involved, career planning and rape prevention. “We met with the leaders several times to tell them our goals--to bring students a lot of campus resources in an efficient way that allows them to get broad experiences very quickly instead of accidentally discovering things over a longer period of time.”

During a panel discussion at the conference, six of the freshmen who participated in the Freshman Challenge program shared some of their first-year anxieties, which ranged from feeling they would be just another face in the crowd to wondering if they would make any friends.

“The thing that’s so different about living in the residence halls,” Margot Kim said, “is that you automatically have at least a hundred friends when you live in the dorms. You have direct access to all social activities--there’s so much closeness in the dorms, whereas when you live off campus you’re separated from that. You go home to your roommates, and you don’t have that group interaction.”

“I’ve always been close to my parents, and after school or in the evening, we always sat and talked,” Wendy Neubauer said. “The Freshman Challenge helped because we got together once a week and got out our stresses--it was like a support group.”

“When you first get here, it’s really hard to find things to do--especially on the weekends,” Karl Klemmick said. “But it’s important to do something fun instead of just staring at your books, and the group helped me learn about opportunities on campus.”

Freshmen must learn self-discipline when they are living away from home for the first time--especially if they are in apartments.

“There’s no one to tell you to get up in the morning and be on time for class,” Kim said. “If you’re tardy, then you’re tardy.

“It’s a big adjustment, but once you realize that now your education is your future, and your future is in your hands, it’s a real awakening. Freshman Challenge helped me relate and become socially involved.”

Julie Haraksin, a counselor for disabled student services, led one of the Freshman Challenge seminars.

Her group discussed changes in independence, the transition from being a leader in high school to one of several thousand students on campus, and the change in academic expectations under the quarter system, which requires quicker assimilation of information.

“My personal goal was to help them develop leadership skills,” Haraksin said, “so I asked them if they would be interested in organizing a Freshman Challenge social. Some of the commuters are envious of the dorm residents because they have so many more planned activities, and I thought this might be a way to provide them with their own activity. I played the role of resource person, but they did all the planning and implementation--soliciting money for a grant, finding a location and all the other logistics. The result was a very successful Freshman Challenge/Commuter Club Mixer-Dance.

“I saw lots of growth in leadership skills,” she said, “especially from the students who were quiet at the beginning of the group. As the weeks passed, they were relying more on each other than on me and had become a cohesive group.”

An administration assessment showed that students in Freshman Challenge achieved higher grades than those in residence halls or not affiliated with any program. None dropped out of school, an impressive figure considering commuters have the highest dropout rate among freshmen.

“There’s so much research to validate what these students said,” Gardner said after listening to the student panel. “Alexander Astin at UCLA, one of the best-known scholars on student development, has a theory of involvement, and his research has shown that students who get involved in activities earn higher grades and are more likely to persist and graduate.”

As panelist Kim said: “Other countries view American students as too recreational--not stressing the academics enough. To me, campus involvement in activities with my peers is important. You can’t just be into your studies. You have to be a well-rounded and happy person. There’s no reason why you can’t be involved with the school, have a social life and still devote 100% to your studies.”