Transforming Students: Fulfilling the Promise of Higher Education

1. On the Threshold

chapter one On the Threshold As a high school senior in Virginia, Bre Detwiler applied to fourteen colleges. After being admitted to thirteen, Bre and her father “got in the car and drove down and drove up and drove over.” She found her college home in Elon, North Carolina: “We loved Elon. There was something so safe about it.” Bre was not referring to Elon as a “safety school” that she would attend if her more ambitious plans did not work out. Nor was she referring to physical safety, although she and her father shared some concern about her habit of going for late evening runs. Instead, Bre—and many of the other students we interviewed—used words like “safe” to describe their immediate sense of comfort with the campus . Eric Brown recalls that he narrowed his college choices to two and then, after visiting both, “I decided that Elon had a much more familiar feeling to it.” Myra Garcia visited all six of the colleges that admitted her, but “I just didn’t find the same feeling that I felt at Elon. . . . It felt so friendly and welcoming .” Sarah Gould describes her experience on a campus tour as a more passionate one: “It was just one of those situations where I got to Elon and I absolutely fell in love with it. I don’t know what it was, but I just walked away with a sense of, ‘That’s the type of place I want to be.’” Jill Medhus speaks for many of her peers when she concludes, “When I stepped onto Elon’s campus, it really felt like home.” Leaving (and Finding) Home The sentiments of these Elon students could be those of many undergraduates across the country. Colleges and universities strive to nurture a sense of belonging, of “home” in their students. And for good reason. Vincent Tinto’s (2012) influential research on college student retention emphasizes 8 Transforming Students the importance of students’ feeling welcomed and valued on campus. The initial challenge for a college, then, is for its students to feel immediately at home in a place they’ve never lived before. Residential colleges like Elon do this intentionally by crafting admissions materials and first-year experiences that invite the students to feel a part of the institution (Greenfield, Keup, and Gardner 2013). They design beautiful campuses, organize orientation sessions, establish students in homelike dormitory rooms, and foster community interactions. During their first semester at Elon, for instance, all students take Elon 101, a one-credit seminar course that supports their transition into the academic community with class experiences designed to enhance students’ academic and interpersonal skills, to encourage social responsibility and personal integrity, to foster respect for individual differences, and to model a passion for lifelong learning. Concordia University in St. Paul, Minnesota, also offers a one-credit first semester seminar for all its students. The Concordia seminar centers on questions about student engagement and mentorship, although the topical focus varies. At Concordia, students select a seminar based on topic, while Elon students are placed in the seminar based primarily on scheduling needs. In both cases, as in the many other such courses at other universities , a core goal of these first-year seminars is to orient students into their new academic community (Greenfield, Keup, and Gardner 2013, 110–11). But stories of students finding a new “home” on campus demonstrate more than just the significance of the actions of faculty teaching first-year seminars and resident advisors in the dorms. The incoming students’ desire for a safe haven at this point in their lives also plays a role. Tim Clydesdale (2007) goes so far as to conclude that most first-year college students are “largely immune to intellectual curiosity and creative engagement” (153). Rather than exploring big questions and seeking worthy dreams, Clydesdale argues, most first-year students create an “identity lockbox into which [they] can place their critical religious, political, racial, gender, and class identities for safekeeping [as undergraduates]” (39). The world is too wobbly and unstable for these students to do more than cling to the familiar while they focus their energy and time on daily life management. Clydesdale’s depiction of the average college student’s need to remain intellectually and On the Threshold 9 emotionally “indoors” does not create much space for the transformation that colleges aim to facilitate in...