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Freshman orientation - college freshmen receive assistance
National Catholic Reporter, Sept 24, 1999 by Pamela Schaeffer
Freshman programs help Catholic schools on two fronts, with the Vatican and with students and parents
Students participate in a team building activity during Orientation Team training 1999 at Xavier University in Cincinnati.
Their parents never had it so good.
In recent years colleges and universities across the United States, concerned about student attrition and about students who see the university less as a place to learn than as a place to stay out late and drink, have been on a quest for ways to connect freshmen to their institutions.
Freshmen often report feeling isolated and lonely after the initial excitement of leaving home wears off. Some aren't ready for the personal freedom or prepared for the rigor of college work.
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For public universities especially, attrition among freshmen is high. Nationally, the rate averages 25 percent; at some schools it is much higher. For the institutions, more is at stake than human misery. Declining enrollments contribute to loss not only of public funds but also of prestige. In those ubiquitous college rankings that administrators hate but parents love, one measure of a school's quality is how many entering freshmen return for the sophomore year.
Programs around the country to boost first-year success range from seminars and small classes that aim to strengthen study skills and connect students to the institution's resources (sometimes called University 101) to social events, mentoring arrangements, and even outward-bound-type programs to promote student-faculty bonding.
Increasingly, schools have an administrator and staff devoted to freshmen. At the University of Notre Dame, for example, there's a dean of first-year students. There's even a national resource center for the Freshman Year Experience at the University of South Carolina, and a journal devoted exclusively to the cause.
Although attrition is usually less of a problem at Catholic colleges and universities, as at most private schools, they, too, are working hard to make the first year better. For one thing, many administrators would like to reduce attrition even more. For another, freshmen programs are a chance to highlight Catholic identity. That helps schools build their image on two fronts: with the Vatican, which is pushing schools to return to their religious roots, and with parents and students weighing the pros and cons of various academic options.
As Phil Lyons, director of student life at St. Louis University, put it, "We have excellent academics, a fine faculty, but it's our Catholic identity that makes us different. That's our niche."
Boston College is among Catholic schools that put enormous energy into an orientation program aimed at instilling values. "Attrition is not our problem," said Fr. Joseph Marchese, director of the first-year experience. Despite a large freshman class, 2,200 this year, the school's average freshman-to-sophomore-year dropout rate is only 6 percent.
"We were more interested in affecting the student culture," Marchese said. "Administrators were concerned about drinking and student behavior; the faculty were concerned about their intellectual precociousness. They wanted students who were alive in terms of their curiosity about the world of ideas."
Inability to balance
Marchese said he had been struck in conversations and counseling with upperclassmen over the years by the realization that the freshman year had often been marked "by an inability to balance, to make the right choices, to connect to the resources of the university." Often, he said, students said they did not really understand what was expected of them and had a hard time finding advisors or mentors.
Marchese developed a program based partly on his own study of human cultures at Harvard, particularly the role of "ritual process" in initiating new members into communities and into "their shared sense of values and expectations." A key component, he said, was "to initiate students to the idea that we are a Jesuit Catholic university," a place where students can develop "not only a good mind, but a generous heart," can grow into leaders "with a sense of compassion, justice and faith." He described the result, which has become a model for other schools, as "a real collaborative effort of a lot of departments across the university."
The three-day orientation weekend, offered seven times a summer, relies heavily on 40 paid student leaders, selected from some 300 applicants. Marchese's first job is to build a sense of community and mission among the student leaders through an intensive training effort that begins with a three-day outward-bound experience.
"That peer voice is very important," Marchese said. "I didn't want the leaders to be telling students where to get false IDs or advising them on the easy way to get through our core curriculum. It's very important that they understand the focus I have in mind."
The program begins with liturgy -- a staple of orientation programs at virtually all Catholic schools. After dinner, parents and incoming freshmen learn the school's fight song, and then hear selected faculty members talk about "the people and ideas that make Boston College special." Over the course of the three days, parents and students, usually meeting separately, discuss the transition to college life, hear Boston law enforcement officials talk about community standards, view skits on a variety of common student problems, tour the campus and library, dance, collect materials at an "information fair" and gather for a final rally where they sing the right song they learned the first night.
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