Mollison Ryan served as the undergraduate intern for "About Campus" during the 2016-2017 academic year. She graduated from Virginia Tech in 2017 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa with a double major in Creative Writing and Professional and Technical Writing. She also holds a 2016 United States Equestrian Federation Horse of the Year title…

The goals of this essay are to shed light on the importance of faculty-student (or staff-student) relationships to student success and to describe the various faculty or staff roles that are available to help students succeed. Students rely on the support of faculty advisors and mentors to help them navigate their undergraduate experiences. Now a…

In this article, the authors report on a successful collaboration between academic and student services that resulted in a Rutgers University Byrne Seminar on social entrepreneurship. The course, entitled "The Business of Doing Good: Combining Business Practices with Social Activism," was designed to inspire the next generation of change makers,…

Perhaps a decade ago, accreditation agencies might have been satisfied with a list of student learning outcomes and some evidence that students achieved them. More and more, accreditors request evidence of "improvement". It is not enough to merely demonstrate that what one is doing works reasonably well; one must also show that he or she…

In their article "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education," Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson suggest that the educator's role is to offer support to students while creating opportunities for them to critically examine and take responsibility for their own experiences. In this article, the authors explore methods for…

Thinkers and scholars have been pondering the meaning of the baccalaureate degree for many years. The author examines current thinking about the core skills students need to learn in college and reveals its historical precedents. (GCP)

The variety of problems identified with undergraduate education at large research universities may best be summed up by a disquieting portrait provided by the Boyer Commission. In its 1998 report, called "Reinventing Undergraduate Education", the commission described thousands of undergraduates receiving instruction from novice teaching…

Results compiled from several studies indicate that college students place significant personal emphasis on matters related to spirituality. Compiling students' responses from the author's 2003 pilot study, subsequent focus group interviews, and the 2004 national survey, along with faculty's responses from the 2004-2005 Higher Education Research…

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) has joined campuses across the nation in identifying and assessing student learning outcomes. With its 20 schools, diverse populations, and multiple goals, how this urban institution managed to organize much of its work around six learning principles is a tale of both caution and triumph.…

Charles Schroeder, "About Campus" executive editor, interviews Russell Edgerton, director of the Pew Forum on Undergraduate Learning, to get his views of a number of important issues including the status of the undergraduate reform movement; the role of assessment in performance improvement; and the emergence of deep learning as a new focus in the…

Shifting an entire institution to embrace undergraduate education as a central mission is a daunting task, particularly if that institution has a history of professional and graduate education and enrolls many thousands of students. Steve Ballard, until this year provost of the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), and Pat Long, UMKC…

Too often, innovation in undergraduate education unfolds something like this: the latest, best idea is implemented by itself, as an add-on to existing curricular and cocurricular practice. While most of the student experience remains the same as it was before the innovation, the new idea offers a twist: a service learning class here, a learning…

Effective writing is a typical goal in undergraduate education, especially in general education program. In a survey recently conducted at the University of South Florida, one faculty member said, "I responded [to this survey] because I strongly believe that writing skills are essential for all college students regardless of their major field…