One particular form of engagement — living in on-campus residence halls — has been shown to be particularly powerful. Alexander Astin of the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles(UCLA) calculated that living in a residence hall during the first year increases a student’s chance of finishing college by 12 percent.
Such insights into the importance of active involvement with campus life have been reinforced recently by findings from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a $3.3 million project based at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind. Since 2000, NSSE has surveyed 435,000 first-year and senior students at 730 four-year colleges and universities.
George Kuh, director of the project, said that the study has shown a positive relationship between purposeful educational activities and both academic success and retention — especially among lower-ability students and students of color. “Looking for ways to enhance student engagement is a promising lever that institutions can pull,” Kuh says.
One way in which hundreds of colleges and universities are addressing the retention issue is by setting up “learning communities.” These take a wide variety of forms, from a few shared courses to schools-within schools where students live and study in a common building and engage in activities such as community service. They go under various names such as “living learning communities,” “linked courses” and “freshman interest groups.” A National Learning Communities Project has been established at Evergreen State College in Washington to promote the idea.
The underlying notion of learning communities is that students benefit both socially and academically from contact with a small group of fellow undergraduates.
The concept is an outgrowth of more than a decade of research, much of it conducted by Vincent Tinto of Syracuse University.
Studies by Tinto and others have shown that participation in a learning community can enhance first-year student persistence rates and have a positive impact on grades and perceptions about college. One nationwide study by M. Lee Upcraft and Jennifer Crissman Ishler, for example, found that retention rates for students who participated in learning communities “averaged 10 to 20 percentage points higher than typical institution averages.”
At Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., 60 percent of first-year students are in one of 65 Freshmen Learning Communities (FLC) — where students live together, take a freshman seminar and engage in other common activities. College officials report that, between 1998 and 2002, the returning rate for sophomores was four percentage points higher for FLC participants than for their non-FLC peers, even though the program ballooned from 80 to more than 1,300 students during that period.
Another institution that has embraced the idea of living-learning communities is the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC), a mid-sized public research university between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. It has established eight such communities around themes ranging from emergency health services to the visual and performing arts. A new one for women interested in technology will be set up in the fall of 2004.
The 32 members of the 2-year-old Emergency Health Services Living-Learning Community, for example, live together on the first floor of Harbor Hall, enroll in courses together, form study groups and sponsor programs with guest speakers. The community sponsors the EMS Bike Team, a group of volunteers who provide first aid at athletic contests and other campus events.
