Off to College is the indirect result of sabbatical leave I took in the fall of 2004. Over the eighteen years I had been a college president, initially at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and then at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, I had become intensely interested in what happens during the first year of college. Indeed, I had come to the conclusion that going off to college is one of those potentially life-transforming events that if done well can have far-reaching consequences.
So instead of flying off England to write yet another monograph in my field of nineteenth-century British history, I enrolled for six months as a first-year undergraduate at St. John’s College, the Great Books school, in Annapolis, Maryland. I survived orientation there along with 135 eighteen-year-olds who were starting their college careers at this venerable but unusual seventeenth-century college. I took the first-year course of study, reading and discussing Greek writers like Homer, Plato, and Herodotus and reexperienced the joys of the college classroom. I hung out at the college coffee shop trying (with varying degrees of success) to connect with my teenage classmates, hearing firsthand about their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Once they had more or less accepted the fact that I was a first-year student like themselves they even invited me to some of their parties, which I cheerfully attended with my wife, Susan. And, of all things, I relived my glory days as a college athlete by joining crew and rowing in an eight-person shell with a bunch of high-testosterone first-year men. I ended up writing an often-humorous book about this experience titled Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again (University of California Press).
In 2006, I retired as a college president and moved back to my childhood home in Mamaroneck, New York, where today I volunteer with the Mamaroneck High School (MHS) Counseling Department helping rising juniors and seniors navigate the college admissions process. One August morning, not long after I arrived in Mamaroneck, a woman I did not know entered the Starbucks where I do most of my writing, introduced herself as the mother of an MHS senior, and then after some small talk exclaimed rather plaintively, “Dr. Martin, I don’t want to be a helicopter parent. But I really need to know what my daughter will be going through after she leaves home for college next week.” She had heard from her daughter about the former college president working with the counseling office and wanted to get an insider’s perspective on the first year. Above all she wanted to be appropriately responsive to her daughter and not end up becoming one of those parents we hear about all too often who cannot let their child go. Soon moms were queuing up each morning at my table seeking advice. I was no longer getting any writing done!
And then a light went on. After spending my entire professional career in higher education and, perhaps more important, after recently reliving the first year myself at St. John’s College, I was in a pretty good position to give some helpful advice and encouragement to parents concerned about whether their children could survive the first year of college without them. And so I decided to write a sequel to Racing Odysseus in the form of a proper college guide for parents and families.
A few comments before I begin.
Some readers might wonder why I chose the five colleges and universities I did to illustrate what happens first year. My response is that I wanted to write about a diverse group of institutions—public and private, large and small, elite and nonelite, located in different parts of the country—that represent four-year residential colleges and universities generally. But I needed to find campuses that would allow me to interview the faculty and staff most familiar with the first year. Few colleges or universities would permit an anonymous person to wander on campus and, without invitation, randomly interview faculty, staff, and students for a book like this. So I chose institutions whose presidents trusted me and who would give me unfettered access to their campuses. I also wanted to include colleges that do the first year well. I ended up choosing five colleges and universities that met my criteria: Queens College of the City University of New York, a large public university; Tufts University, a smaller, elite private university located near Boston; Vassar College, a national liberal arts college located in suburban Poughkeepsie, New York; Washington College, a small liberal arts college located in rural Chestertown, Maryland; and Morningside College, a regional church-related comprehensive college located in Sioux City, Iowa, the heartland of the Midwest. All the faculty and staff I interviewed were proven, seasoned professionals in their respective fields.
Readers might also ask why I am qualified to write specifically about the first year beyond the fact that I was a college president. First, I want to emphasize that I am not a social scientist who has studied the first year using empirical data and analysis. Nor do I claim to have a solution for all the pressing issues facing first-year students and their parents, like how to bring down the cost of a college education or how to deal with sexual assault. Instead, I write as a student of the first-year experience starting from when I was a first-year college student myself to when, after retiring as a college president, I started counseling college-bound high school juniors and seniors.
Because of a learning disability, my own first year at an otherwise wonderful college was an unmitigated disaster. The first year is often problematic for students with a learning or physical disability and so I write with some knowledge but also compassion about this subject. After college, my involvement with first-year students continued as a graduate student at Yale University, where I was a master’s assistant in one of Yale’s undergraduate colleges and wrote a master’s thesis on, in part, the effect of coeducation on an (until then) all-male undergraduate population, including first-year students. Later, at Middlebury College, one of my jobs as assistant to the president was to field telephone calls from disgruntled parents who were calling the president’s office to complain about one thing or another. And perhaps most important, I was a parent of first-year students myself and can vividly remember the day each of my daughters left for college.1
As my readers will discover, this book is largely about “best practices” in higher education, namely, what should happen first year. But sometimes colleges fail their first-year students, and so I will often allude to what I call “educational malpractice”—not at the colleges I write about (they were selected in part because they do the first year well) but elsewhere. When I do this, I will make some suggestions about what your first-year student can do should things go wrong.
Finally, when talking about how the colleges I write about in this book deal with particular issues—say, how they deal with a bad roommate situation or when a first-year student gets caught doing drugs—I will often say that this is also what other colleges do. Obviously, I can’t know how every college in America deals with a particular concern or problem; but with a general knowledge of over one hundred colleges in the Annapolis Group of liberal arts colleges (of which my college is a member), I have a pretty good sense of how other colleges and universities address common first-year challenges.
Some additional comments by way of introduction:
The gold standard of data on first-year students is produced every year by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. Unless otherwise indicated, when I refer, throughout the book, to data regarding first-year students, it is to this survey. The 2014 report is based on a survey of 9,168 full-time first-year students attending American four-year colleges and universities. I would like to thank Professor Kevin Eagan, director of the Higher Education Research Institute, for providing me with this report.
Perhaps the leading American scholar of the first year is John Gardner, president of the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education. After reading a proposal for this book, he reminded me that many first-year students these days do not attend traditional four-year colleges and universities but instead are part-time students and/or attend community colleges and thus live at home with their parents or on their own. He therefore suggested I focus my book on first-year students who attend traditional four-year colleges and universities and not give the misleading impression that I was writing about all first-year students. With Dr. Gardner’s helpful comment in mind, this book is dedicated to the parents and families of the approximately 1.2 million high school students who will go off to a four-year college or university this year.2
Dr. Gardner also pointed out, quite correctly I think, that we should stop using the term “freshmen,” which might suggest that all college students are males, and instead refer to “first-year students.” I have done this throughout the book except when I am quoting others who still use this term. I deeply appreciate Dr. Gardner’s helpful suggestions and advice.
For obvious reasons, while I use real names and identities for all the faculty and staff I interviewed for this book, I have protected the identities of most of the students I write about. In the few instances where I use real names, I have received permission to do so.