by marshall swanson

USC’s programs to help undergraduates succeed are winning awards and building a strong foundation for future Carolina students.

Last fall when University 101 co-director Dan Berman welcomed the incoming class of new first-year students to USC, he ended his remarks by talking about Rain Man, the 1988 movie with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman.

The film, in which two brothers reunite during a cross-country journey, ends with Hoffman’s character turning to his brother and saying, “One is for bad. Two is for good. Choose two for good.”

The meaning of the exchange, Berman said, is that when people are alone, they’re likely to become alienated, floundering, and lost. Two means someone cares for you, you’re connected to another person.

“This is the essence of what University 101 is for you,” Berman told the new students. “And I promise that if you take this first-year seminar designed to help you take full advantage of the University’s resources, you’ll never be a ‘one.’ You’ll always be a ‘two,’ always have at least one professor or instructor as a resource who cares for you, and perhaps an upper-class peer leader who will be there to support you.

“We know you have the ability to do well here if you got into this room,” Berman said. “University 101 is dedicated to helping you. We’re here for you.”

What a difference from only a generation or two ago when parents and grandparents of today’s first-year students can probably remember an orientation that was the polar opposite of Berman’s words of encouragement. Likely as not, students of the late 1960s and before were ushered onto their campuses with the stern admonition to look left and right to catch a glimpse of those who would probably flunk out in the coming four years.

Today, the caring approach of University 101 has become the ethos for several other first-year programs designed to help students. Taken together, those initiatives have made Carolina a national leader in innovative student programming.

The crowning proof came in December 2002 when USC was selected with only 12 other universities to receive the Institutions of Excellence in the First College Year Award. The award, made by the Policy Center on the First Year of College, which was then funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Atlantic Philanthropies and is now funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lumina Foundation, cited USC for its exemplary commitment to learning and success of first-year students.

The recognition was a lofty achievement, yet it marked only the most recent acknowledgement of the University’s programming for its students. For several years before the Institutions of Excellence recognition, the University had been garnering an enviable array of awards signifying its leadership role not only in providing, but also pioneering programs designed to ensure the staying power of its new students.

In 1997, for example, TIAA-CREF, the national financial services firm, presented USC with its Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for “an outstanding faculty development program that has shown great success in enhancing teaching skills and enriching the intellectual welfare of undergraduate students.” In 2002, U.S. News & World Report ranked Carolina’s University 101 program No. 1 in the country among “Programs That Really Work,” and in 2003 as one of the country’s “Top Programs to Look For.”

In addition, Carolina’s first-year programming has been the subject of complimentary articles, reviews, and word-of-mouth commentary from a broad spectrum of the nation’s journalistic and higher education communities. Carolina’s successes also have been shared with other colleges and universities world-wide since 1986 through the work of USC’s National Resource Center for First-Year Students and Students In Transition, which exchanges information and ideas on student curricular and co-curricular initiatives.

It’s all an outgrowth of the original concept embraced by the founders of University 101 that the University has an obligation to both support and to challenge the students it accepts, said Mary Stuart Hunter, who co-directs University 101 with Berman. Moreover, she added, University 101 helped create a culture of responsiveness to students and a pro-active approach to student support. In so doing, it paved the way for much of the other student programming that was to follow.

That included, in the early 1990s, development of the:

• Carolinian Creed, a statement of values, beliefs, and behaviors expected of members of the University community that was recognized in Colleges That Encourage Character Development: A Resource for Parents, Students, and Educators, edited by the John Templeton Foundation

• Freshmen Centers and First-Year Living and Learning Communities offering creative programs and academic support services for 88 percent of first-year on-campus students

• Student Success Initiative, which pairs residence hall advisors with students to encourage their academic success and retention, and

• Residential Classroom Project, in which classrooms were created in residence halls to create an academic atmosphere where students live.

Last August when first-year students arrived at the University for the start of the fall semester, they were met at their residence halls by volunteers of the Faculty-Staff Moving Crew, including President Sorensen, who helped students move in while others made sure their computers were properly connected to the Internet. This began their personal connections with individual faculty and staff at Carolina.

The following day students attended a special convocation at the Koger Center at which they were introduced to the Carolinian Creed, were personally welcomed to campus by President Sorensen, and heard remarks from the previous year’s winner of the Amoco Outstanding Teaching Award.

The day after, some 800 of the students took part in the First-Year Reading Experience as their inaugural academic experience on campus, and 10 days later, winners of highly prestigious Carolina and McNair scholarships met as a group to learn what was expected of them and to be paired with faculty mentors.

Some of these scholars enrolled in the University’s Honors College and lived in Maxcy, the first-year honors residence hall, while others were welcomed to Preston College, the University’s residential college.

Later in the semester, faculty would be contacted by the University’s Office of Fellowships and Scholar Programs seeking the names of

outstanding first-year students who might qualify for highly competitive scholarships and fellowships.

Other students would be helped by the Office of Pre-Professional Advising that assists pre-professional majors in preparation for pre-law and pre-med testing and study. Some of these students were living and learning together in a small residential community designed to support their rigorous academic demands.

This array of programs for Carolina students means they can enjoy a small college liberal arts education with all the advantages of a flagship graduate research institution, including first-rate faculty and access to outstanding libraries and laboratories, said Don Greiner, who was named in 1993 to the position of associate provost and dean of undergraduate affairs.

The programming has helped vault USC’s retention rate to an extraordinary 84 percent from the first to second years. It also has made it easier to recruit top students and re-emphasized the University’s undergraduate mission.

While the 84 percent freshman-sophomore return rate is enviable (compared to a range of 72–77 percent for other comparable institutions), Dennis A. Pruitt, the University’s vice president for student affairs, said “we can do better. We’d like to have 90 percent of the students return, and we’re working on that.”

Part of Carolina’s effort to continually improve its student programming is based upon additional data on the current generation of students, their characteristics as a group, and the state of their educational environment, Pruitt said. “One of the great things about the college environment is that we’re good experimenters, we’re always doing research and assessment, and we’re always tweaking these programs.”

For example, Student Development and University Housing director Gene Luna has just created a new staff position of student learning initiatives coordinator.

“We felt the opportunity to go beyond the classroom and to extend student learning throughout the entire collegiate experience was such a rich opportunity that we needed someone to put their heart and soul in residentially based academic initiatives,” Luna said.

Jimmie Gahagan, the new coordinator, also is heading up a housing task force to look at what can be done during students’ sophomore year to appropriately modify the support structure they enjoyed as freshmen. The intent is to extend similar goals and aspirations to help students continue to be successful through their first two years.

Luna also envisions a more prominent Web presence that will easily highlight and enhance first-year living and learning opportunities for students, and more emphasis on undergraduates participating in research, which he sees as “the next watershed change in undergraduate education.”

Also on tap is the exploration of ways students who live on campus can reach out to the larger surrounding community with service-based learning. Clearly, Luna said, there has been a transformation in the education of first-year undergraduates at USC and elsewhere. What also is clear is that while learning often “just happens, we have the ability to decide how and when we want that to happen, and then intentionally design the collegiate experience to do that.”