The First Year Experience: An Administrator's Perspective
Presented at a Panel Discussion of the
Caribbean Tertiary Level Personnel Association October 2003 (CTLPA)
by Angela E. Samuels
Principal, Montego Bay Community College
The discourse about the First Year Student Experience arises out of our concern about student retention and success. Our policies must therefore be guided by the goal of ensuring maximum student success.
From an administrative point of view we must:
• Provide an environment which is learner-centered.
• Create a caring campus.
• Develop an understanding of the changing demographics of the first year students whom we seek to serve.
• Ensure that as administrators we have an understanding of the kinds of services which our students need.
• Offer programs aimed at facilitating the social and academic integration and smooth transition of the First Year students into the community of the institution.
• Provide the kinds of resources necessary to assist our staff to facilitate the best possible experience for our students. This means starting from day one, hence the focus on first year students. Frontload essential institutional resources.
• Provide leadership which promotes good practice in student affairs departments.
As administrators, our concern very often tends to be the bottom line, and in mans' ways that is our job. Many university and college presidents in North America are not educators, but lawyers and accountants. A healthy bottom line can be achieved by increasing enrollment but in order to do so we need satisfied customers who will not only stay in college and complete their studies but who will also recommend the institution to their friends and family members.
Arthur Levine (1990) in his book Shaping Higher Education's Future pointed out that reducing attrition is the easiest way for colleges to increase enrollments. He suggested that institutions can accomplish this in ways very similar to those used to encourage access. These include
• An institutional commitment to graduating students, not simply enrolling them
• Leadership that is knowledgeable about the causes of attrition and retention methods that work
• An educational program geared to the abilities and needs of the student body and the demands of the economy and society
• A program of easily accessible support services targeted at the particular student body that an institution enrolls
• An attractive, warm and comfortable environment in which relationships with faculty and staff are encouraged
• A staff that reflects the characteristics of the student body and shares a commitment to education (p. 176).
The role of the administrator is therefore to ensure that all of these components are in place.
Perhaps one of the most difficult tasks of any manager is to establish and communicate a clear vision to our organizations. Without an understanding of the vision there will be no ‘buy-in”. Our mission statements and our policies must therefore reflect our vision.
Many of the educators in our colleges and universities are not trained in education and understandably are more comfortable doing things the way they were done when they were in university. We Jamaicans have inherited an elitist, tertiary education system in which student success has not always been the focus. It is therefore necessary to sensitize our staff to a new paradigm of learner-centeredness. Administrators must help our staff to shift our focus from the needs of faculty and other administrators to the needs of students and other stakeholders.
Kay McClenney (I 998) said “Innovation falls short when it is used as decoration.” She talks about the “Christmas tree model of reform”. According to McCLenney, “You hang one here, and then another pretty one here and before you know it you have a bunch of glittering ornaments hanging on ... a dead tree.” (p.3).
We must therefore have a cohesive and inclusive plan for our First Year Experience.
Recently, there have been calls from different quarters to lessen Jamaican government funding at the tertiary level and place more of our scarce resources at the lower levels. Administrators must therefore also be concerned about performance and accountability. McCLenney (1998) warned that the inescapable reality is that policymakers and the public are through signing blank checks for higher education. We are going to be expected to perform, to document performance, and to he accountable for producing returns on taxpayer and student investment. We are going to see this dynamic reflected in performance indicators, performance funding, performance contracting and performance pay (p.3).
The Internet has globalized education so students now have more choices than ever for good tertiary education. They can therefore vote with their feet or rather their “fingers”. Not only do we have several offshore universities competing for our students but they can access many reputable universities colleges worldwide on the web. This forces all of us, especially administrators, to he less complacent and to focus more on ensuring that our institutions are offering quality education. Peter Senge once said that there are only two things that really prompt change: one is aspiration , the other desperation.
Administrators must respond to that need for change by engaging themselves in four elements that will help to direct action. Our goal of providing a great First Year Experience must be reflected in
(i) the budget,
(ii) the plans,
(iii) the vision and
(iv) a well developed strategy to achieve that vision.
This vision of the kind of First Year Experience which we would like our students to have, must be the collective property of all the college or university stakeholders. That means every choice, every decision - about staffing, resource allocation - everything gets subjected to a simple screen; “How does this improve learning?” This begs the question
…. “What kind of learning?” or “What should they learn?” Joan Leichter Dominick (2003) from Kennesaw State University, speaks of “weaving a global mindset from institutional vision to productive global citizen”. Her institution shared its best practices for developing this mindset in an innovative session which included incorporating diversity issues, the creation of reflective student e-portfolios, developing service learning projects for connecting local and global issues, and media analysis strategies for understanding certain local and global perspectives . This is a good example of what one institution values as the kind of learning which must be part of the First Year Experience of today's students.
As we think about what the first year student should learn. I remember that in the 2003 Caribbean Tertiary Level Personnel Association (CTLPA) conference, we agreed that character development was very important and so the learning must be geared towards the development of healthy values and attitudes. The following words about the responsibility of colleges and universities were written by John Dewey and are on his gravestone at the University of Vermont:
Things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doing and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those that come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we received it.
Today there is much talk in our society about values and attitudes. Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini (1991) did extensive research, and wrote a book entitled How College Affects Students in which they investigated the effect of college on the development of verbal, quantitative and subject matter competence; cognitive skills and intellectual growth: identity, self concept, and self-esteem, relating to others and the external world: attitudes and values: moral development, educational attainment, career choice and development. They also looked at the economic benefits of college and quality of life after college. As I was jotting this down, I thought since college has the potential to impact on all these areas, then ours is truly an awesome responsibility. I wondered if most of us administrators really think about the profound effect which our decisions have on the lives of our students and the implication which this must have for our policies as they relate to our first year students ?
One of the most important roles which administrators must play in promoting a great First Year Experience is to be good role models. We must, by our lives, demonstrate the kinds of values and attitudes which we expect our students to learn and model the kinds of behaviours which we expect our staff to exhibit. For example, if we honestly believe the studies which say that one of the most important factors in student retention and success is the student-staff relationships and interactions, then we cannot lock ourselves away in our ‘ivory tower” offices and not be easily accessible to staff and students alike.
We must create opportunities to meet with both staff and students in formal and informal settings. John Gardener (1995) stressed the importance of the involvement of the president, chief academic officer, and chief student personnel officer in the lives of first year students — teaching or engaging in other meaningful kinds of activities. One of the most rewarding aspects of my job as a principal is the time which I take to meet with students in their academic advising groups. Another example of this can be found at Sam Sharpe Teachers College which has a Principal's hour. In large universities this will prove almost impossible for administrators. However, even if senior officers cannot have regular contact, the opportunity to occasionally meet with groups of students and listen to them is very important and can be most instructive for anyone who must make policy decisions which affect students.
Finally, administrators must be informed by the systematic assessment of programs related to the First Year Experience. We must insist on frequent reviews, evaluations and updates of these programs and policies to ensure that they stay current and are meeting the needs of our changing student population.
As we consider the First Year Experience from the administrative perspective, we must accept the fact that each institution is unique. However, I think that we will all agree that we share some common goals and there are certain things which we must all try to do. I conclude by paraphrasing a comment made by Arthur
Levine:
We have the ability to do nothing, to hope for serendipity, or to shape tomorrow. The choice is entirely ours.
REFERENCES Gardener, John (1995) The Freshman Year Experience, The Freshman Year Experience Resource Seminar University of South Carolina: National Resource Center for The Freshman Year Experience, Division of Continuing Education. Leichter, Dominick, I. E. (2003) Weaving the Global Mindset from Institutional Vision to Productive Global Citizen, www.kennesaw.edu.university studies/first year/ Levine, Arthur (1990) Shaping Higher Education's Future: Demographic Realities and Opportunities 1990-2000. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. McCLenney. KM. (1998) Community Colleges Perched at the Millennium: Perspectives on Innovation, Transformation and Tomorrow. Worldwide Web Edition, August 1998
vol. 11 (8). Leadership Abstracts. www.league.org Pascarella, F. T. and Terenzini. P. T. (1991) How College Affects Students. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
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