*Another important finding of research on student success* is that the seeds of leaving college tend to be planted early. “It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that you will lose half of the people you will lose — either physically or psychologically — by the end of the first semester,” said Peter Ewell, an expert on higher education assessment and vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS).

“Certainly you don’t find a lot of people flunking out for academic reasons after the second year.”

Jennifer Nichols, for example, nearly dropped out of Castleton State College in Castleton, Vt., during her first year for a variety of reasons, including financial and academic worries. “I was afraid of flunking out and ending up with a lot of loans that I would not be able to pay,” she recalled. She found strong support from an adviser who helped her register for the right courses and who offered academic support when she did poorly on the initial tests in a theater course.

Nichols also got support from her roommate (who helped her learn her lines for the theater course) and from a weekly seminar called First-Year Studies. “The seminar is run by a student, and you get to know a group of students really well,” Nichols said. “We talked about topics like dating violence and alcohol.”

The seminar Nichols took is typical of first-year programs that are now a fixture at hundreds of colleges and universities across the country. The best-known proponent of the strategic advantage of such programs is John Gardner, executive director of the Policy Center on the First Year of College in Brevard, N.C.

Gardner’s interest in retention issues dates to 1970 when the anti-war protests turned into a riot on the campus of the University of South Carolina, where he was then teaching. “The president was profoundly disturbed by these events and felt that the rioters had not entered the university angry,” he recalls. “So we began to re-engineer the freshman year to produce a new generation of students that would love the university. The goal was to produce happy campers, and we found that we kept them longer.”

Gardner and his colleagues began with a program to train faculty and staff members to be more effective in understanding and working with students. The next step was to create a three-credit seminar for first-year students — dubbed University 101 — that took the form of an extended orientation program but also encouraged students to join clubs, engage in service and otherwise become engaged in the life of the university.

The seminar idea took on a life of its own and blossomed into a national movement called the Freshman Year Experience. The National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition was established on the South Carolina campus, and in the two decades since, its conferences have drawn more than 90,000 persons.

In 2002, Gardner’s new Policy Center at Brevard launched a National Survey of First-Year Academic Practices. That survey paints a comprehensive picture of policies and programs at 1,000 colleges throughout the country and allows individual institutions to compare their situation with national trends. The center also publishes a list of model first-year programs and is working to develop a set of standards — called Foundations of Excellence — for such programs.

A good example of a comprehensive first-year program is the First Year Experience at Elon University in Elon, N.C. The program kicks off well before students show up for classes with a spring orientation weekend in May and an optional experiential learning program during the summer. In the summer program, about 120 first-year students join returning students in activities that range from whitewater rafting to working for Habitat for Humanity. “When our new students arrive in August, they have already begun forming a class and making connections,” explained Stephen Braye, an associate professor of English. Fall orientation begins with Move-In Day, an all-campus event in which faculty members quite literally help students lug their belongings from their cars to their new rooms.

Orientation includes social activities to help new students establish friendships, as well as small-group discussions of the honor code, coursework and academic goals. Both the spring and fall orientation programs include sessions for parents on how to prepare their children to leave for college and how they can assist in the first-year adjustment.

Central to the university’s approach to building high persistence rates is Elon 101, a one-credit course taught by a faculty member and an upperclassman. The course is taken by nearly all first-year students, who meet weekly in groups of about 15 during the first semester to discuss academic, social and personal concerns.

One recent Friday afternoon, Sandra Seidel, an associate professor of biology, met with her group of students who are interested in the health professions.

She walked them through the procedures for registering for courses in the spring semester and helped Megan Blaney figure out how to construct her schedule. “I’m a golf player and have to keep afternoons free,” explained Blaney, who is majoring in exercise and sport science. “Science majors have their own set of problems,” said Seidel after the class. “If they are interested in med school or physical therapy, they need to keep in mind graduate school course requirements, as well as what it will take to get out of Elon.” Sometimes Seidel is called on to help pre-med majors change programs after a painful encounter with first-semester chemistry. “One of my students is switching to business,” said Seidel. “I helped her realize that there are plenty of business-related sciences. And I help students explain such decisions to their parents.”

As part of Elon’s system, each first-year minority student is paired with an upperclass student who serves as a mentor. Also, the first-year program features a low key “early alert” system in which faculty members can notify counselors if a student misses classes or does poorly on early assignments.

University officials credit Elon’s first-year program with a consistent rise in four-year graduation rates from 45 percent in 1989 to 69 percent for the most recent graduating class. The rise has been particularly dramatic among African-American students, whose retention rates nearly doubled — rising from 32 percent to 71 percent — during this period.

Students and faculty members alike note that Elon’s approach involves multiple, even overlapping programs that share a common emphasis on building personal connections in the university community. “No one lives in his own tower,” said Becky Olive-Taylor, associate director of the on-campus advising center.