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Preparing Students to Succeed in College

Introduction

Since the end of World War II, educators in the UK have worked to find better ways to prepare high school students for success in higher education. The public schools and higher education have made major investments to this end. Secondary schools have devoted more resources to AP and concurrent enrollment courses, and to advising students on college admissions (Tinto, pp 12-189). Colleges and universities, for their part, have acknowledged the difficulty of the transition from high school to higher education by creating hundreds of transition and first year experience programs. And together, educators and policy makers are increasingly describing education as an endeavor that begins in kindergarten and ends with college graduation. The results of this work are mixed. Certainly more students are attending and graduating from colleges and universities than ever before, and groups of people who were once routinely excluded from higher education are now finding more space there. On the other hand, there are signs that a large proportion of college-bound students still leave high school inadequately prepared for college.

Student Expectations

Over the past eight years, Freshman Academy, a learning community's initiative at Universities, has asked thousands of first year students about their expectations for higher education. These students have been among the most successful high school students in UK. Their average high school GPA is 3.75, their average ACT composite score is 27, placing them in the 90th percentile of students taking the ACT. They have spent hundreds of hours in community service and taken, on average, three AP courses while in high school. Yet nearly every one of these students, at the end of their first semester at BYU, has experienced major difficulty in at least one of their classes. When asked why this is the case, the students sometimes point to instructor incompetence or the innate difficulty of certain subjects. But more often they say they were unprepared for the sort of learning demanded of them at the university (Light, pp 34-89).

From their explanations for their difficulties we have created a list of freshman “myths”—beliefs that get in the way of student success in the first year of college. The remainder of this essay describes some of those beliefs about higher education, their impact on students, and the advice we offer in an attempt to improve student transitions to the university (Leamnson, pp 45-138).

Beliefs about Individual Study Habits

Nearly all new university students believe that they can succeed at the university using the same study skills that they used in high school, even if they admit to almost never studying outside of class in high school. There is certain logic to this belief—after all, those study skills have been developed over several years and have proven successful at winning admission to the university (Engel, pp 34-282). But while those skills have served students well on their way to the university, they are unsuited to higher education. Many critics of the public ...