"Freshman Connections Seven Years Later: Meeting the Challenges of Success"
18^th International Conference on The First-Year Experience
Southampton, England
11-14 July 2005

Introduction—"What Have Been Our Successes"

On June 23^rd, the Public Broadcasting System—the states' public service network, broadcasted a two-hour documentary that was two years in the making:  "Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk."  Simultaneously, the program developers—Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow—published an edited collection of essays by the same title featuring 15 essays by well-known educators, commentators, and writers, even with an introduction by American novelist Tom Wolfe.  Both the broadcast and collection of essays largely bemoaned the sorry state of American higher education, hoping to call to mind an earlier jeremiad on elementary and secondary schools—the 1983 report "A Nation at Risk."

In "Declining by Degrees" Hersh and Merrow highlight large classes, alcohol abuse, the overuse of graduate assistants as instructors, the lack of preparation by students who also do not study enough, grade inflation, and the fact that professors seek a "separate peace" with students, tacitly agreeing not to demand too much from them if the professors are allowed to pursue their own research interests.  One of the only positive notes, and it is a brief one, is the mention of "learning communities."

Ball State University's learning community, Freshman Connections, is responsible for approximately 3500 new students each fall.  Put simply, Freshman Connections places new students living near one another in a residence hall in the same first-year courses, thus affecting their social and intellectual development.  Freshman Connections works on the simple principle that if students new to an institution feel comfortable in their initial weeks, they will learn, and if they learn they will stay, and if they stay they will graduate in increasing numbers

Ball State University has had the pleasure to be recognized for our success with our first-year programs.  Some of those markers across the eight years of this program include:

• In 2003 named an "Institution of Excellence in the First College Year" by the national Policy Center on the First Year of College.  That has included a chapter in the recent publication Achieving and Sustaining Institutional Excellence for the First Year of College
• In August 2004 named by U.S. News and World Report one of 42 schools with "programs to watch for" in the first-year experience
• Statistical Highlights—1996 to 2003 first-year classes (analysis in Years 1-3 indicated that change in enrollment standards could only account for about half of the changes in probation, disqualification, and retention rates, the rest being credited to "other" factors, of which FC is the only other major change)
  • Second-year retention rate-rise from 68.3% to 78.3% (University Strategic Plan set a 2006 goal of 80% for second year retention)
  • Spring retention rate-rise from 84.3% to 92.6%
  • Spring disqualification rate-drop from 8.0% to 3.9%
  • Spring probation rate-drop from 27.3% to 13.1%
  • 4-yr graduation rate-rise from 20.1% to 29.4% (data current up to 2000 first-year class only)
  • 5-yr graduation rate-rise from 41.3% to 49.9% (data current up to 1999 first-year class only)
  • 6-yr graduation rate-rise from 46.7% to 52.7% (data current up to 1998 first-year class only) (University Strategic Plan set goal of 60% for 6-yr graduation rate by 2006)
• For the 2003-2004 academic year FC was given a line in the regular budget (for $150,000), meaning we no longer had to subsist on grant monies
  

Freshman Connections—my specific topic today—has played a significant role in these changes.  Freshman Connections began in 1997, as a fall semester program designed to include all first-year students, built largely around residence hall units with commuters integrated into existing Learning Teams.

FC for Fall 2004 consisted of 10 Learning Teams, each of which included faculty for UCC courses taken by students assigned to those teams (66 total), academic advisors (15 total), residence hall staff (15 total), upper class mentors (10 total), and 250-450 first-year students (number depends on the space in each residence hall unit open for new students).  Each team has a Blackboard site to enable team-wide communication.

Ball State's "Freshman Year Experience Survey" which first-year students complete each spring provides a brief look at students' responses to key features of FC.  The following results reflect the views of 1,148 returned surveys from 2003 first-year students (percentage reported combines "strongly agree" and "agree" responses):

• "Assigning freshmen to courses with other students living in the same residence hall is a good idea"-83.6%
• "Living near students in these courses helped me make friends"-68.9%
• "Living near students in these courses helped me with my studies"-66.5%
• "Professors referred to similar ideas"-53.6%

Percentages on all four of these responses rose since the previous survey. (Bullet points #2 and #3 were answered by residence hall students only.)

Those, in brief, are the successes of the program; however, what challenges result from that same success?

(1) Revision of University Core Curriculum (UCC) Goals
FC is based on the broad goals of the current UCC (see "Core Curriculum").

In 2002, leadership for FC identified three more specific goals drawn from the original UCC goals (wording borrowed at times from the work of Richard Light):

• Connect classroom learning with out-of-class learning, thus transferring
  abstract, generalized concepts to situations in their non-classroom hours,
• Increase meaningful work among members of Learning Teams, especially 
  between faculty and students,
• Help students see the relationships between the microcosm of Ball State's 
  learning community and the wider social structures that surround us, within  
  which they will have to make decisions after graduation.
  

In 2002-2003, the university organized a Task Force charged with rethinking the 20 year-old goals for the 21^st century.  I served on the task force.  New goals identified are quite compatible with FC goals, but too broad yet to foresee necessary changes to FC's structure (see "Proposed UCC Goals").

A second Task Force has been working to implement the new goals, though changes in university leadership have slowed that process.  We have not been asked in FC how we might best work with any particular structure.  However, the move toward interdisciplinarity could provide more opportunities for us, for tighter threads within Learning Teams.  Also critical in the new goals is a desire to have students recognize the consequences for ideas outside the classroom.

Should FC take the initiative to become more involved in this process?  When?  How? With whom?  Again, these questions are complicated by the changing leadership over the past two years.

(2) Freshman Connections' Evolving Structure
FC began with 26 teams focused around paired classes.  Such a design fit the common definition of a "living-learning community" by pairing students in classes and relating those pairs to residential units.  With so many students requiring tight schedules for their majors, we were never able to achieve as high of a percentage of students "connected" to the program in this manner. 

FC evolved to 16-18 teams with pairings "preferred," but again we took seriously our mission to serve as many of the first-year class as possible.  Realizing that the three goals listed earlier were sufficiently challenging for such a first semester program, FC then opted to organize around 10 teams (parallel to BSU"S 10 residence units) for which the focus lay more with tying together in-class and out-of-class learning.  FC opted to tighten the message within residence units, though in the process giving up the common class (ENG) and almost all paired classes.  (FC retained a few paired classes to test continuing success with that structure.)

Though even now we cannot schedule all students in an FC class, we do keep track of all first-year students, noting their relationship to their teams and how they need to be contacted with relevant information.  For example, 84% of new residence students are placed in the appropriate FC class for that unit, or if they are commuters, they are placed in the appropriate FC class paired with the assigned first-year advisor.  The remaining 16% we track either through the residence hall or the advisor assigned to each team.  All students are linked electronically to their respective teams via Blackboard sites.  As a result of ideas heard at this conference, we will continue to develop those Blackboard sites, tailoring them even more to deliver information to students at the point of need.

Though we are satisfied with how the overall structure of the program has evolved, the challenge is to be aware of what further changes might be required as demands change.

(3) Administrative Changes—"There is much to love about this place."
This line appears in the chapter of the recent book chronicling the successes of Ball State's first-year programs, "The Story of Ball State University: ‘Everything Students Need'" (Achieving and Sustaining Institutional Excellence for the First Year of College).  To give one a sense of the administrative changes Ball State has seen since the campus visit on which this chapter was based, 28 names are mentioned in this chapter.  Of the 28 mentioned, 23 are no longer with the university as of July 1, 2005.  Eleven different names are mentioned; six are no longer with the university as of July 1, 2005.  Two key pages in the chapter (pp. 302-303) discuss "The Advantage of Stable Leadership" to first-year programs.  Ten names are mentioned in that section; only one of those remains with the university.

According to Swing and Cutright, authors of the chapter on Ball State, the grassroots of Freshman Connections can be traced back more than 15 years to two organizations: the Liberal Arts Think Tank (1988) and the Freshman Learning Council (mid-80's), an organization of 35-40 faculty, administrators, and professional staff drawn from such diverse areas as Career Services, Financial Aid, Residence Life, and Counseling Services, all with some effect on the quality of the lives of first-year students.

Freshman Connections itself began in Fall, 1996 with the formation of an organizational committee of 21 members drawn from across all divisions of the university.  That committee, on which I served because of my work with general education and freshman writing, was chaired by the then Associate Vice-President for Student Affairs and Dean of University College, indicating the degree of cooperation between Student Affairs and Academic Affairs. 

After establishing Freshman Connections and setting it off to its work in the first year, leadership evolved to a nine member coordinating committee that met every week for two hours for five years.  The consistent members of that committee over the years included the original chairs of the organizational committee, the directors of residence life, advising, and the office of teaching and learning advancement, and myself.  Other members would join us as their interests and assignments dictated.

By Year 7 of the program (2003-2004) day-to-day leadership evolved once again to three members of that coordinating committee (the director of residence life and two faculty members) who meet every week, and who call together the coordinating council periodically for guidance and brainstorming as needed.

To my knowledge, none of those involved have ever received any type of released time to plan or coordinate any aspect of this program.

The challenge now is to rebuilt knowledge about and support of FC with a new set of administrators.   We are in a transition phase in which much of the knowledge about the history of the program and communication about the program has been lost to retirements and administrators leaving the institution.  The loss of the president who ordered that the program be built for all first year students (1984-2000), the provost who supported that decision (1985-2002), and the dean of sciences and humanities from whose college most classes and faculty for the program were drawn (1987-2002) leave large gaps in the formal and informal structures of support for FC.

One specific administrative challenge is how to continue Ball State's traditional commitment to "teaching and learning" even as the university continues to evolve a more faculty intensive research model typical for large U.S. institutions.  Swing and Cutright make the following comment early in their chapter about Ball State:

     The answer to how this unique focus on first-year students came to be can be    
     found in the extraordinary leadership of a core of formal and informal campus
     leaders, the institutionalization of services to first-year students by creating and
     funding formal organizational structures, the partnerships between academic
     affairs and business affairs, and the institution's ability to embrace teaching  
     as a primary component of the institution's mission.

Clearly as faculty become more narrowly focused on research, issues related directly to teaching, especially when they involve added meetings outside of direct classroom instruction, become much less of a priority for them.

I saw that re-focus when I served as Assistant Chairperson and Chairperson of the Department of English and later as Interim Associate Dean of the College of Sciences and Humanities.  We currently have a very young staff of tenure-line faculty members in my department.  Only 5 of 35 tenure-line faculty were at Ball State when I arrived in 1983.  From 1998-2002 when I served as chairperson I personally hired young, vibrant, enthusiastic scholars.  These are excellent colleagues, but they are rarely scholar-teachers, especially in areas related to teaching and learning issues related to 18 and 19 year-olds.  Another large department in the university is beginning to experience the same changes.

Where is the faculty leadership for FYE programs for the next generation?  

(4) Faculty
Past focus group members have highlighted what they value most about FC (e.g., involvement in aspects of students' learning beyond the classroom, some additional summer support, the ability to collaborate with other university professionals).  Can such benefits, though, survive the continual pressures on P&T and external review shared by Assistant Professors, and increasingly by Associate Professors?

Clearly, success in any program breeds increased involvement, and involvement by the faculty is critical for any first-year program's success.  Past research has illustrated that any successful FYE is directly related to the level of involvement of an institution's faculty.  Young faculty want to be successful teachers.  Few young faculty are involved with FC, but those who are not only are successful, but they wish to become leaders and spokespeople for the program.  Do we risk their "image" as young faculty focused on their research agenda by having them seem so visible with FC?  How directly involved in the promotion and tenure process should I become as director, speaking for these young dedicated faculty members?  How easily are my peers swayed by an argument that FC is more directly related to "learning" than to "service"?  What responsibility should a department promotion committee have toward "learning" beyond their department's classrooms, if one of their faculty members takes on a leadership position with FC?

For established faculty, their involvement in the program is slow to develop.  Some departments have strongly supported FC (e.g., Mathematical Sciences, Anthropology, Speech Communications, History, and Philosophy).  Ball State does not have many graduate students teaching UCC courses, rather we rely on a dedicated cadre of fulltime contract faculty.  Many more contract faculty are involved with the program than are tenure-line faculty.  We are grateful for that support, but can FC build a stronger network of support among tenure-line faculty?

One of the means to build that support is through the annual selection of the Freshman Common Reader.  With each new reader comes a new opportunity to draw on the expertise of different departments.  FC has used that opportunity to build support for the program as a whole, calling on colleagues to help write support materials for the students and discussion leaders, to provide local connections to national speakers, and to sponsor department activities connected to the chosen book.

Such cooperative ventures are also possible with the annual sponsorship of a play (we are now being asked to sponsor other productions by the College of Fine Arts), the desire by some departments to address current issues (e.g., Department of Political Science and major elections), and the chance to include new students in other campus-wide efforts (promoting Ball State's annual national meeting on the "Greening of the Campus").

FC takes advantage of many opportunities to build campus-wide and department-specific support for the program, though care must be taken not to let a desire to work with an area draw efforts away from our specific mission to work with and for first-year students.  

(5) Programming
Current Programs sponsored include those designed for the entire program, as well as those unique to and planned by each of the 10 Learning Teams (BSU research indicates that social factors help determine student success early in the first semester, while academic concerns rise after that point; FC tries to adjust its programming accordingly):

• Programming designed for FC as a whole
  • Common Reader
  • Common Reader Discussion after Freshman Convocation
  • Sponsorship of a designated play in the fall
  • Lectures designed by the university community to fit book topic
  • Broader-based events appropriate for first-year students (e.g., for Fall 2004 these included events on the 2004 election and on preventing sexual assault)
• Individual Teams (must include at least one for each of the first four areas)
  • Academic Connections project (e.g., study sessions for UCC classes assigned to that team, or information sessions on requesting classes for spring semester)
  • Sustainability project
  • Art/Humanities project
  • Service project
    

Over the years FC has tried to draw a fine line between sponsoring too much overall programming (for which we are accused of "micromanaging") and not enough overall programming (for which we are accused of "not providing sufficient direction").  One measure of FC success has been the number of other programs that have asked FC to build their attendance through our co-sponsorship.  The attendance for the annual freshman convocation on the Sunday before the start of fall classes had dropped to around 600 before joining with FC's book discussion effort.  Now that event regularly draws around 2500 first-year students.

However, a serious risk arises when FC's mission to assist first-year students becomes misdirected by others' purposes.

One extreme example occurred in the Fall of 2005 when FC selected as its Freshman Common Reader Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation.  We meant to focus largely on the health and nutrition decisions newly independent first-year students need to begin to make in their lives.  After announcing our selection in the spring, we received many congratulations for such a wise choice, particularly from our health, nutrition, and wellness experts on campus.

Unknown to us, the local newspaper had sent one of its reporters to a national seminar on the food industry in an attempt to better address the attention our local faming communities were experiencing from national and international confined animal feeding operations.  Soon we were being accused of promoting a liberal agenda meant to undermine capitalism and indoctrinate students.  FC's selection of Fast Food Nation became part of activist David Horowitz' accusation that Ball State students needed to be protected by a state law guaranteeing that equal views would be promoted.  Our own College of Business faculty took their case directly to the local press even after admitting that they did not take advantage of our annual offer to help bring to campus any related speakers, identified by a campus unit, who would address any legitimate aspect of the reader.  Finally, external pressure groups used their influence to push their own agendas on the university.  Ironically, all of this external pressure drove away many local speakers FC approached to discuss the effect of all of these issues on local businesses and farms.

As a result, our programming is much more scrutinized than in the past, although we have since taken advantage of such scrutiny to ask for advice from all levels of the university about whom to invite for the annual panels and lectures to the students.

Surely risks arise when a program becomes a better recognized feature of the university's educational mission.  FC needs to keep its eye on its mission to work with and for first-year students, while recognizing that at times, other interests groups would prefer to deflect that mission as well. 

(6) Assessment

FC is committed to assessing its effectiveness and regularly tracks such large scale effects as changes in first-year students' probation, disqualification, and second-year retention rates.  FC also tracks longer term changes in 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th year graduation rates.

Early studies of the effect of Ball State's change in enrollment requirements on first-year probation and disqualification rates (which occurred in the second year of FC) indicated that half of the improvements found could be tracked to stronger enrollment characteristics of students, but the other half had to be explained by "other" factors of which FC was the only other major change in university efforts for first-year students.  After the new enrollment standards stabilized, students continued to show improvements during a time when FC was modifying its structure and programming to address the results of its annual assessments and periodic focus groups.

Still, such analysis does not address the critical issue of "learning."  If FC values "learning" as its key goal, then it cannot be trapped in a "bottom-line" mentality that does not directly address directly its most important goals. (Even though one could argue that FC has maintained for the university in its first seven years a conservative estimate of $15-20 million in second-year tuition alone.)

If we are engaged in rebuilding support for FC among a cadre of new administrators and if we must be realistically aware that with a share of the university budget the university deserves to know how its investment of funds is benefiting students, then FC must develop techniques for shedding light on the goal of "learning" for new students.

(7) Other
Time does not allow us to address two final questions: FC still struggles with the best way to integrate commuting students (abut 14% of each incoming class) into a program designed structurally as a residential program, and FC has not yet found a good way to utilize a group of dedicated undergraduate mentors (Freshman Connections Assistants).

Summary
Clearly FC would like to "rebuild" the level of internal support it enjoyed as a program, support that developed over the 15 years of consistent leadership at the university.  But beyond that FC would like to "deepen" its support among faculty in particular.

The chapter on Ball State's first-year programs, "The Story of Ball State University: ‘Everything Students Need'" begins with the sentence "Attention to first-year students is deeply embedded, broadly distributed, and widely embraced at Ball State University," while the concluding paragraph begins, "Ball State is doing so much that is right that the major challenge is simply to continue the status quo."

That is our challenge for the immediate future.  I know it will keep me focused on my work with UCC reform, my efforts to keep key administrators informed about the program, my work with such university committees as the Freshman Learning Council, and my work with faculty development.

When I report on this institutional initiative five years from now, wherever we are gathered in 2010, I look forward to reporting new levels of success and achievement by students and faculty in Ball State's Freshman Connections program.

MORE INFORMATION?=>Freshman Connections--Ball State University