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HEN JOHN N. GARDNER JOINED THE FACULTY
of the University of South Carolina in 1970, the collec-
tion of offerings that would become known as the first-
year experience did not exist. Over the next three decades, Gardner
and his colleagues succeeded in shifting higher education’s attention to
the experience of first-year students and, more recently, to the experi-
ence of all students in transition.
Charles Schroeder spent some time with Gardner recently, asking
him to turn his experienced and critical eye on the educational estab-
lishment he has worked for more than thirty years to change. Here is
what he had to say.
CHARLES SCHROEDER: Your name is synonymous with the first-year experience.What was the catalyst that prompted you to devote most of your life to this aspect of under- graduate education? J OHN G ARDNER : It was a phone call, an invitation from a university president who cared enough about younger developing faculty members to invite them to partici- pate in certain types of innovative efforts to rethink undergraduate education. I’d been at the University of South Carolina [USC] for two years, minding my own business, teaching history to beginning college students. In July 1972, a month after Watergate,
CHARLES SCHROEDER TALKS TO JOHN GARDNER
The First Year
and Beyond
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Thomas F. Jones, president of USC, invited me to a workshop, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was about.A little over two years before he had been barricaded in his office during a student riot, which led him to put together a faculty–student affairs committee to study the causes of the riots. But he got impatient with the progress of the committee deliberations and came up with the idea that the key to preventing future riots was to restructure the whole socialization process of bring- ing students into a major research university. He wanted to develop a process to redo the first year and teach stu- dents to love the university rather than be angry and trash it. SCHROEDER: I know our readers are aware of the signif- icance of the first year and all the positive changes that have occurred over the past two decades. In your judg- ment, has the first-year experience come of age? GARDNER: I probably need to define first-year experience in order to answer your question.When we first started using the term in 1982, we didn’t offer a definitive meaning and use for it, so people started using it how- ever they wanted. In my use, the term meant a national and international effort to improve the first year, the total experience of students—and to do this intentionally and by rethinking the way the first year was organized and executed. Many other people in higher education thought the term meant a particular type of program or intervention for first-year students, most notably the first-year seminar concept with which I’ve been associ- ated. But the concept of the first-year experience, how- ever it is defined, has been in the lexicon now for twenty years, and our research has found dramatic increases in its use and in all of its potential applications. So I would say there’s no question that this way of thinking about undergraduate education has definitely matured and become institutionalized to varying degrees across the four thousand or so postsecondary institutions. S CHROEDER : In recent years we’ve certainly seen more attention given to advising and a proliferation of first-
year seminars, and we’re now seeing at least one-fourth, perhaps one-third, of first-year students involved in some kind of learning communities, and we are seeing a lot of Supplemental Instruction. Are there additional challenges that you see in terms of helping to realize the full educational potential of the first-year experience? G ARDNER : There are many additional challenges. How much you value and are willing to invest in education for first-year students has always been an issue that cam- puses have faced, but it has become more difficult given the enormous economic constraints that many of us now face. I believe that institutions always find the money to do what they most value, so the question is, What do we most value? For many campuses, doing the foundation year well may not be a high priority, partic- ularly when you have decreasing resources. So one basic challenge is simply to maintain the resource base. Beyond that, many of the initiatives you just summarized have been efforts to change the first year by going outside of or around the faculty.When American higher education wanted to improve academic advising, what did it do? It went out and hired thousands of professional nonfaculty advisors, and it founded a professional organization that represents many faculty but also a disproportionately far greater number of nonfaculty professional staff adminis- trators. Many of the first-year seminars have been launched and sustained with disproportionately greater uses of staff than faculty.This is understandable; when you want to change a campus, you go to those areas that respond most immediately to change, and they may be
Has the first-year experience come of age?
There’s no question that this way of thinking has
become institutionalized to varying degrees across the
four thousand or so postsecondary institutions.
John N. Gardner is senior fellow and distinguished professor emeritus of the University of South Carolina and executive director of the Policy Center on the First Year of College. He can be reached at gardner@brevard.edu. Charles Schroeder is professor of education at the University of Missouri–Columbia and a contributing editor of About Campus. We love feedback. Send letters to managing editor Paula Stacey (pstacey@josseybass.com), and copy her on notes to authors.
they have very little contact with faculty, they have very little contact with what the academic enterprise is all about, and they are welcomed into the academy by some very enthusiastic, friendly, and competent social admin- istrators and staff. I think we unintentionally socialize students into college more in terms of the social aspects of the experience than in terms of the academic expe- rience. S CHROEDER : So is part of the problem that perhaps we are giving students mixed messages? G ARDNER : I don’t think there is any question about it. We certainly are. All you have to do is look at any admissions promotional materials, such as a college view book or Web site, and the way the college experience is portrayed visually for students. If you do a content analysis of the photographs, you are going to find in most publications a disproportionate number of photos showing students in recreational, leisure, and social pur- suits. It really sets a tone. SCHROEDER: You’ve been involved with a variety of ini- tiatives that have been designed to stimulate higher lev- els of student engagement. Are there any best practices that you could identify? G ARDNER : I think we have a pretty clear idea of some best practices, but it is often a quantum leap to move from that to being willing to invest in best practices. For example, the evidence supporting Supplemental Instruc- tion is very, very powerful: students who spend a mini- mum of fifty minutes a week receiving Supplemental Instruction led by another student typically do much better than like-qualified students who don’t participate. This is a concept that is twenty-six years old, that has been used in a dozen countries and on about seven hundred campuses, and that is supported by a huge amount of research. It tells me that if we invest more time in having faculty as well as other types of educa- tors, but especially faculty, recruit and supervise and
reward and evaluate their very best students for teach- ing other students, we will have a lot more successful student learning. A lot of examples drawn from peda- gogies involve more active learning group work or for- malized study groups, not only making assistance available but actually making students use it. I think we are very reluctant to use the authority we have to com- pel students to do some of the things we know are bet- ter for students if only they will do them. I think we’ve gotten too focused on treating them as independent adults and letting them sink or swim on their own. I was more inclined to do that when I was younger, but the older I got the more I realized that at least my stu- dents in South Carolina were more likely to be suc- cessful if I made them do certain things. Once the students did them, they found out that they were help- ful, and then they pursued them voluntarily. One of the things we’ve learned from the instrument Your First College Year, which can be used as a posttest of the UCLA Freshman Survey, is that students recognize they need help and they report all kinds of stress, but do they go get the help? No, they don’t. A best practice would be to mandate student participation in more of these interventions.
S CHROEDER : Are you suggesting, similar to Dick Light at Harvard, that we need to become more intrusive in students’ academic life?
GARDNER: Yes, I think we’ve given them far more free- dom than they know what to do with, and I don’t think they are making very constructive use of it.They are making lots of choices in the cocurriculum and in the off-campus employment sector, but they are not mak- ing as many or as wise choices about what might keep them more focused on the academic side of the college experience. SCHROEDER: You just mentioned one of the instruments that you and your colleagues have been involved in,
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We are approaching colleges and universities with the
assumption that they already know what they need to
know about their first-year students and about how that
knowledge is related to student success—but they just
don’t know they know it.
Your First College Year, which is a joint project with UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. I believe you also have a couple of other assessment initiatives under way—a national benchmarking survey and a first- year data audit tool kit.Will you tell us a little bit about these initiatives and how they can be used to improve the first-year experience?
G ARDNER : They grow out of three grants that we, the Policy Center on the First Year of College, received to develop some new tools and procedures for assessing the first college year. I want to stress that it’s the first college year because we have been trying to get campuses to develop a better understanding of the whole of the first- year experience, both the curriculum and the cocur- riculum.We have developed the national benchmarking survey First Year Initiative in collaboration with the for- profit firm Educational Benchmarking, Inc., to evaluate the first-year seminar. First-year seminars have been around since 1882, but there has never been a nation- ally produced, readily available instrument to evaluate the effectiveness of these courses, which are now found on 80 percent of the baccalaureate campuses and 62 percent of the campuses of two-year community col- leges. We’ve finished our second year of administering the First Year Initiative, a tool developed by my col- league Randy L. Swing, at eighty-five schools, and we’re very encouraged by the first year’s results at sixty-two institutions. Each institution picks five peers against which to benchmark.You don’t know the scores of the other five institutions, just the aggregate scores and your scores. So there is nothing competitive about this, which we expect will produce more genuine motivation and broader participation. Some thinking about what we call the pedagogy of engagement has emerged from the first survey. Swing found that the seminars most highly rated by students are those that are most likely to use what we are calling engaging pedagogies. This takes us back to the behavior of the instructor as opposed to the behavior of the student. We are also finding that the seminars thought of most highly are those in which student lead- ers play a key role, and we find for the first time some pretty persuasive evidence that students rate more highly
courses that have at least two, preferably three, hours of credit as opposed to the one-credit model.This is very important because the one-credit model is the most common. My hope is that the evidence we are produc- ing will encourage colleges to do a better job of train- ing their instructors to use more of these engaging pedagogies and to give serious consideration to increas- ing the amount of credit to at least two and preferably three hours per term, and perhaps even over multiple terms. The second instrument, the Data Audit Tool Kit, is a project we undertook with the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.This was ini- tially the brainchild of Peter Ewell, their senior scholar, and I sort of leaped on it and suggested that we collab- orate.The tool kit teaches colleges how to extract more and better data from their existing sources and then syn- thesize the data to create a more complete picture of what’s really happening to their first-year students.We are approaching colleges and universities with the assumption that they already know what they need to know about their first-year students and about how that knowledge is related to student success—but they just don’t know they know it. In other words, they have the information but don’t know where it’s found and how to get it. Most schools are not going to make serious changes in what they do for first-year students without some form of evidence, and this is a further effort to try to produce more evidence to help bring about change. SCHROEDER: So all three of these tools—Your First Col- lege Year, the First Year Initiative, and the First Year Data Audit Tool Kit—really can help institutions improve and create even more innovative ways to connect with first- year students. GARDNER: That’s right.They’re all designed to improve assessment of the first-year student experience, with the hope that you then use that information to actually make decisions.This is the heretical notion that you’d actually use assessments to bring about educational improvement. S CHROEDER : Let’s shift to another kind of heretical notion, which I think is becoming more accepted: the
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Many colleges and universities are run like the American
corporation: they want a quick financial return and
are not thinking twenty, twenty-five years out.
tion we are talking about, the president of the univer- sity or the college has to insist on integration and true collaboration.This is a challenge because the majority of American college campus leaders are people who never used student services. In the 1950s or 1960s in most American colleges, other than the few big research universities, there just weren’t student affairs officers. There were no financial aid offices prior to 1965 and there weren’t any career centers. It will be some time before we get more people moving into the ranks of CEO-level jobs who experienced an environment that was shaped in some meaningful way by the input of stu- dent affairs professionals. For much of the past half cen- tury, the argument has been that we are going to be better off if we have a totally separate student affairs division reporting to a vice president who reports directly to the president. I am not persuaded any longer that this is the most effective model.
SCHROEDER: So would placing student affairs under the provost be one strategy to increase integration and coherence?
G ARDNER : There is no question that there would be more integration if everything passed through academic channels. One reason that so many of the student affairs units got clobbered during the last recession and will get clobbered again this time is that the key decision mak- ers saw them as being so separate and therefore less important.That created a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we are feeling the consequences today.
S CHROEDER : Let’s shift gears.We’ve been talking about the first-year experience, but you’ve been a strong advo- cate all your life for the senior-year experience.Tell us a little bit about its current status:What is going well, and what needs to be done in terms of addressing unfinished business?
G ARDNER : More and more educators are realizing that the two key windows for capturing data on students for assessment purposes are when they enter college and when they leave it.You need to know about them when they enter so you’ve got a baseline against which to measure what you’ve done for and with them as they
leave. And I think the assessment movement, thanks to the accreditors, has encouraged more attention to be paid to the senior-year transition. As educators became increasingly interested in the first year, they recognized a lot of similarities between the first year and the last year, and that many of the strategies we have been developing for the first year might also help pave the way for a successful transition out of the university or college. I’m talking about partnerships between faculty and student affairs officers, special seminars on transition issues, much more integration of career planning, ritual and ceremony for arriving and departing students, and efforts to build enthusiasm for the institution as students arrive and as they depart. In addition, colleges need to be more successful in cultivating alumni because of the decline in state appropriations and the realization that we are going to be continually more dependent on dis- cretionary gifts from our alumni. So more attention is being paid to the senior year and there has been a renaissance of interest in the medieval practice of the capstone course.These courses are labor intensive and very expensive, but colleges are realizing that you need to provide the most empowering, introspective, reflec- tive, intellectual experiences for your departing students or they are not going to think much of you as they walk out the door. I have to say, however, that it is a lot harder to sell college and university administrators on invest- ing in the senior-year initiative than in the first-year ini- tiative because they don’t see an immediate return of financial resources from the investment in the senior year. Many colleges and universities are run like the American corporation: they want a quick financial return and are not thinking twenty, twenty-five years out. But there are institutions saying that if we provide a certain experience for a student when he or she is twenty-two years old, we’re more likely to receive major gifts when they are fifty-two.
S CHROEDER : You and Betsy Barefoot recently founded the National Policy Center on the First-Year of College at Brevard College in North Carolina.What is its pur- pose and what are some of the major projects you are sponsoring?
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If we provide a certain experience for students when
they are twenty-two years old, we’re more likely to
receive major gifts when they are fifty-two.
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GARDNER: Betsy and I were building a home in Brevard when, thanks to the Pew Charitable Trust and then the Atlantic Philanthropies, we had the opportunity to found a new center that would work in a complimen- tary, nonduplicative fashion with the National Resource Center at USC.We can do projects that we hadn’t had either the time or the money to do through the National Resource Center.We can also focus our work more narrowly on the assessment of first-year outcomes in order to bring new people into the conversation about the first year, uncover new evidence or informa- tion, and develop ways to get people involved and invested in the assessment process. We are about to launch a new project called Hall- marks for Excellence in the First College Year. It is based on a simple but profound observation: if you are a col- lege or university that wants to aspire to excellence in what you do for first-year students, there is no national blueprint or plan for how to do this or for how to mea- sure how well you do it. So we are going to develop a set of standards for two institutional cohorts. One cohort is the approximately 515 members of the Coun- cil of Independent Colleges, which are the less well endowed, somewhat less selective smaller liberal arts col- leges.The other cohort is the 430 regional comprehen- sive public universities that are represented by the American Association for State Colleges and Universi- ties.We will develop two sets of sector-specific hallmarks for excellence, and a process to certify whether or not the colleges have indeed satisfactorily addressed those hallmarks.We hope this will lead more colleges and uni- versities to aspire to achieve these hallmarks and then be evaluated to see whether or not they have addressed the standards, and if they have, whether they have been suc- cessful.We are trying to create both a demand for the certification process and an actual willingness to partic- ipate in a voluntary certification process.
SCHROEDER: I’m going to give you a special option that I don’t give anyone else in interviews. I’d like you to untether your imagination and respond to this ques- tion: If it were in your power to create your own col- lege, what would it look like? How would it be organized, what would be taught, and how would stu- dents describe it?
GARDNER: Oh, my goodness. I guess I would try to design a place that incorporates many of the features of some of the places I’ve been most intrigued with in my travels and readings. If this college were to be funded by the state or the federal government, I would have us funded on grad- uates and not on full-time equivalency enrollees. I’d want us to be funded for outcomes, and if we don’t produce we don’t stay in business. I would like to see us emulate Alverno College and develop dramatic alternatives to the traditional grading system. I don’t think the current grad- ing system is one that encourages real learning, particu- larly intrinsic learning. I’d want to see a structure where the students are much more involved in running the col- lege. I would have a pretty revolutionary approach to pedagogy, and we would invest proportionately far more in faculty development.The criteria for being appointed in the first place would place a much higher premium on teaching abilities than now occurs with most faculty appointments. I would not have a tenure system. I am persuaded that we would need to have protections ensur- ing the free speech of faculty and forms of faculty auton- omy. I like to think that in this ideal college I’d find a way to protect people without tenure. I’d also like to create the kind of environment where there would be no col- lective bargaining. I think I would incorporate a number of the elements of West Point, though not the military discipline. I’d want far more faculty living on my campus, like West Point has. I would want every entering student to have an upper-class student who was responsible for whether the entering student succeeded or failed. I would want to have the most powerful kind of peer teaching we’ve ever seen in a civilian college. I would not want to have revenue-producing athletics at all, because I think they have a predominantly negative impact on the cul- ture of the academy. S CHROEDER : Let me make sure I’ve got this: you are talking about your ideal college as being learning cen- tered, results oriented, composed of engaged and invested students, and supported and challenged by sub- stantive faculty involvement, along with powerful peer teaching. Knowing you as I do, and seeing what you’ve accomplished in less than thirty years, you might just be able to pull this off. And if you do, I’m going to be the first to sign on with that outfit.
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