Higher education professionals engage peer leaders in a variety of settings, from academic advising to residence life and from orientation to the senior year experience. Although the structure and administration of peer leader programs varies depending on the unique needs and features of a particular college or university, there is a commonality across peer leaders and their experiences. In short, peer leadership has a triple-impact in that it benefits student recipients, the institution, and the peer leaders themselves.

Toward Peer Leadership as a High Impact Practice: Insights from the U.S. Data in the 2023 International Survey of Peer Leaders contributes to the academic scholarship on peer leadership through the recent collection of over 1,500 student responses on their experiences as peer leaders. This report looks at peer leadership as a high-impact practice, examines the equity and access to participation in peer leadership, and explores key questions for practitioners looking to implement, refine, or assess their peer leadership programs, as well as for researchers with an interest in drawing findings of this survey for their work.

Transfer students are an important yet often understudied and underserved population within postsecondary education. Millions of students rely on the transfer function of community colleges and two-year schools to earn bachelor’s degrees. Yet, low student transfer and bachelor’s degree completion rates indicate a leaky transfer pipeline. Given the growing interest and increase in transfer and transfer-intending students across the postsecondary landscape and the longstanding degree completion challenges these students often face, institutional leaders and staff must understand how they can best support transfer students and bolster their persistence. For this reason, the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition created the inaugural National Study of Transfer Student Initiatives.

This report details the results from the 2021 National Study of Transfer Student Initiatives and is intended to provide leaders, researchers, and policymakers with a national overview of transfer-related policies, practices, and procedures as well as institutional and bureaucratic barriers to their development, coordination, and implementation. In addition, it prompts discussions for leaders and staff as they consider how transfer-related efforts may be improved to better meet the needs of students.

Rethinking Student Transitions: How Community, Participation, and Becoming Can Help Higher Education Deliver on its Promise, presents a reimagined theory of student transitions in college. The authors contend that while previous theorizations have helped move the practice of supporting student success forward through the latter half of the twentieth century, earlier conceptualizations and models have led to an inconsistent and incomplete picture of students’ experiences in transition. The book offers both a review and critique of current models of transition and then develops a new conceptual viewpoint based in the ideas of situated learning and transitions as becoming. The second half of the book is dedicated to using this new theoretical perspective to illustrate how higher education professionals can create conditions to support students in transition more intentionally, with a particular view toward supporting historically marginalized students, including racially and ethnically minoritized students, first-generation students, and post-traditional students.

A publication of University 101 Programs, University of South Carolina, Transitions is the customized textbook for students in the University of South Carolina's University 101 first-year seminar. It includes both general and institution-specific information for first-year students.

Topics include time management, academic success strategies, career development, information literacy, health and wellness, and values and identity. An ideal model for institutions working to design a custom-published, first-year seminar text.

Transfer students face a unique set of challenges when trying to get acclimated to their new environment. In the current transfer literature, there is an absence of career development in all its forms including career resources, career advising, career coaching/counseling, professional readiness, and job search strategizing. Ensuring Success for Students Who Transfer: The Importance of Career and Professional Development works to fill this void.

This publication presents anecdotal and data-driven evidence of career development and professional readiness being infused at various universities to offset the imperceptible career voice in current transfer literature.

A publication of University 101 Programs, University of South Carolina. The University 101 Faculty Resource Manual, 2024 is the 15th edition of the publication and builds off previous versions. This edition has been updated to reflect best practices for teaching a first-year seminar. The first nine chapters constitute the “textbook” for U101 instructors and were written by University 101 Programs Staff.

Each of the 10 learning outcome chapters were developed by committees with diverse representation from across campus based on their expertise, review of literature and best practices, and approaches that have worked well in past years. The manual is updated each year based on assessment data indicating which approaches work best for achieving course outcomes.

To order the PDF - please send an email request to stylusinfo@styluspub.com which includes your full name, billing address, and phone number. We will call you to obtain your payment information, after which we will email you the PDF.

The First-Year Seminar: Designing, Implementing, and Assessing Courses to Support Student Learning and Success, a five-volume series, is designed to assist educators who are interested in launching a first-year seminar or revamping an existing program. Each volume examines a different aspect of first-year seminar design or administration and offers suggestions for practice grounded in research on the seminar, the literature on teaching and learning, and campus-based examples. Because national survey research suggests that the seminar exists in a variety of forms on college campuses -- and that some campuses combine one or more of these forms to create a hybrid seminar -- the series offers a framework for decision making rather than a blueprint for course design.

The series includes:
Volume I: Designing and Administering the Course
Volume II: Instructor Training and Development
Volume III: Teaching in the First-Year Seminar
Volume IV: Using Peers in the Classroom
Volume V: Assessing the First-Year Seminar

Editors/Authors:
Volume I: Jennifer R. Keup & Joni Webb Petschauer
Volume II: James E. Groccia & Mary Stuart Hunter
Volume III: Brad Garner
Volume IV: Jennifer A. Latino & Michelle L. Ashcraft
Volume V: Daniel B. Friedman

A Faculty and Staff Guide on Supporting Sophomore Student Success is part of a series of action-oriented guides intended to blend research and practice to enhance the professional development and capacity of faculty and staff toward the ultimate goal of increasing the learning, development, transition, and success of students during their time in college or university. More specifically, this guide uses Schaller’s (2005) psychosocial developmental model, beginning with random exploration and concluding at commitment, as a framework and organizing structure to help advisors to interpret the experiences of students and then link those experiences to related learning outcomes.

Throughout this guide, readers will find questions for reflection, specific strategies for advisors, and practical tools to use when working with students at the various developmental stages. These resources align with the developmental experiences for students at each psychosocial stage.

Research suggests that as many as a quarter of all undergraduate students may find themselves on academic probation during their collegiate years. If students on probation choose to return to their institutions the semester following notification, they find themselves in a unique transitional period between poor academic performance and either dismissal or recovery. Effectively supporting students through this transition may help to decrease equity gaps in higher education. As recent literature implies, the same demographic factors that affect students’ retention and persistence rates (e.g., gender, race and ethnicity, age) also affect the rate at which students find themselves on academic probation.

This book serves as a resource for practitioners and institutional leaders. The volume presents a variety of interventions and institutional strategies for supporting the developmental and emotional needs of students on probation in the first year and beyond. The chapters in this book are the result of years of dedication and passion for supporting students on probation by the individual chapter authors. While the chapters reflect a culmination of combined decades of personal experiences and education, collectively they amount to the beginning of a conversation long past due.

Scholarship on the impact of academic recovery models on student success and persistence is limited. Historically, attention and resources have been directed toward establishing and strengthening the first-year experience, sophomore programs, and student-success efforts to prevent students from ending up on academic probation. However, a focus on preventative measures without a consideration of academic recovery program design considering the successes of these programs is futile.

This volume should be of interest to academics and practitioners focused on creating or refining institutional policies and interventions for students on academic probation. The aim is to provide readers with the language, tools, and theoretical points of view to advocate for and to design, reform, and/or execute high-quality, integrated academic recovery programs on campus. Historically, students on probation have been an understudied and underserved population, and this volume serves as a call to action.

The sophomore year represents a critical transition for students. As institutions shift their attention from these students to the incoming class, sophomores can feel unsupported as they face increased academic challenges and explore major and career options. Sophomore dropout and disengagement has led administrators, faculty, and researchers to increase their attention to these students’ unique needs.

The 2019 National Survey of Sophomore-Year Initiatives sought to explore institutional responses to and support for sophomore students. This new report reviews these findings, including institutional practices related to academic advising for sophomores. Additionally, the report offers implications for research and practice by highlighting the ways in which institutional efforts and initiatives can be better designed for responsiveness based on differences in campus context, student backgrounds, and student needs.