Two days ago I attended my eldest son’s high school graduation. During the ceremony the principal announced the post-secondary plans of the graduates. One statistic grabbed my attention: 51% of the 512 graduating students indicated that they plan to attend a community college after leaving high school.

Since I work at the local community college and have been active in developing programs for new students, I tried to comprehend what this meant for our campus. The sheer magnitude of the number of new students to hit our college this coming Fall Semester became clearer as the name of every single graduate was called, and minutes turned into an excruciatingly long hour. I remember having the same sense of concern last year when attending my youngest son’s 8th grade promotion. The lines of students from our severely overcrowded K-12 district seemed endless, and I kept thinking, “In a few years most of these students will end up at our community college. Will we be ready for them?!”

New Students: 50% Dropout before Spring Semester

My concern is not that more and more students are enrolling at our campus. I love the open access of the California Community Colleges, which I view as their greatest asset. It is the fact that, of 2500 new freshman enrolling at our campus every Fall Semester, approximately 50% will not return to our campus the second (Spring) semester.

During a recent training session, I gave the following analogy to our Peer Advisors in order to help them to better understand our retention problem: “Can you imagine if you ran a company, and half of your product never even made it off of the assembly line?!” More than 20 years of working in Higher Education has given me a clear understanding of the multitude of reasons that this occurs.

• Entering students often do not have a clear idea of why they are attending college- they just know they have to do something after high school.
• Scores of new students enroll in community college only to find that they must spend semesters, or even years, taking foundational courses (also referred to as “remedial,” “basic skills,” “non-degree applicable,” or “non transferable”).
• Many new students try to “wing it” on their own, attempting to navigate confusing educational pathways without the assistance of academic counselors or mentors.
• Students also fall victim to the “I Can Do Everything Syndrome” believing they can work 40 hours per week, take 18 units a semester, hang out with their friends every weekend, and still transfer to a university in two short years.
• We frequently hear faculty members bemoaning the challenges of working with new students. They want to help them, yet are frustrated at the overwhelming needs new students have aside from instructional issues, such as the lack of good study skills, time management, and an understanding of what it takes to succeed in a college environment.

Freshman Seminar: Designed to Retain Students

At Cosumnes River College we have decided that, despite the plethora of reasons for the high dropout rates of new students, we must do something to try to rectify this unacceptable situation. We recently developed and marketed a Freshman Seminar to our new 18-20 year old students. This learner-centered course helps students at our commuter campus to develop support networks, identify potential barriers to success, and learn about campus resources that can help them to overcome these barriers.

We developed the curriculum and an accompanying New Student Guidebook after reviewing best practices of numerous other colleges and universities throughout the country with similar programs. We solicited highly motivated faculty from various disciplines to teach the course sections. We included Peer Advisors as classroom assistants to reinforce the concepts, and to help make the material relevant and applicable. We provided ongoing training for both the faculty and Peer Advisors involved in the Freshman Seminars, as well as a resource binder full of classroom materials and sample collaborative learning activities for each instructor.

Positive Results

Our preliminary research is encouraging: 82% of the students who enrolled in the Freshman Seminar returned for a second semester. This was especially significant because a higher proportion of our at-risk students enrolled in the Freshman Seminar. In addition, midway through their first semester 80% of Freshman Seminar participants stated that they had already met with, and developed an Educational Plan with an academic counselor. 90% stated that the class had been helpful to them.

We plan to continue to develop curriculum materials, offer variable unit/discipline-based sections of the Freshman Seminar, involve faculty from various departments, recruit returning Freshman Seminar instructors to help train and mentor new instructors, and conduct ongoing research, with the long term goal of institutionalizing this program and others that have proven effective at retaining students. Rather than accept the high dropout rates of new students as unchangeable, we are committed to looking for creative ways to turn these numbers around and help as many of our students succeed as possible.

 

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About the Author

Sharon Padilla-Alvarado
Tutoring Coordinator
Cosumnes River College
Sacramento, California

Sharon Padilla-Alvarado is the Tutoring Coordinator at Cosumnes River College in the Los Rios Community College District. Ms. Padilla-Alvarado has worked in Higher Education for the past 24 years at six different colleges: Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, Sacramento State University, Imperial Valley College, Woodland Community College, Folsom Lake College, and Cosumnes River College. She has worked in the areas of Housing, Educational Equity, Student Activities, Transfer, Voc. Ed., MESA, Counseling, Career Development, Academic Advising, Tutoring, and Instruction.. She designed, and developed the curriculum for CRC’s Freshman Seminar Program. Ms. Padilla-Alvarado earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and Spanish, and her M.A. in Education (Administration & Policy Analysis) from Stanford University. Her son enrolled as a Freshman at CRC Fall Semester 2007.

Sharon can be reached at 1-916-691-7131 or padills@crc.losrios.edu.