There is an increasing need for student affairs professionals to understand the experiences of student athletes in higher education. The researchers asked: How do academic, athletic, and social experiences integrate to affect the freshman student athlete transition to college and impact their overall college experience? The results indicated that…

Students, parents, and employers, increasingly expect higher education institutions to prepare students for careers and workforce needs. Given the increasing diversification of our society and workforce, the ability to work across difference is more imperative than ever. This paper examines the factors that predict the development of students'…

Utilizing longitudinal data of 3477 students from 28 institutions, we examine the effects of structural diversity and quality of interracial relation on students' persistence towards graduation within six years. We utilize multilevel discrete-time survival analysis to account for the longitudinal persistence patterns as well as the nested…

What is known about freshman students, especially about their lived experience, is fragmentary and unsystematic. This study attempted to construct a comprehensive portrait of the daily experience of freshmen at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. A total of 24 students (20 women, 4 men) participated in the study during a 3-month period.…

Anthropologists have documented the importance of rites of passage rituals for marking the successful passage from one position in the social structure to another. The characteristics and importance of rituals and rites of passage to mark the transition high school to college will be presented. It is proposed that colleges and universities utilize…

The perceptual mapping technique was used to solicit University of Maryland college freshmen's perceptions of the campus environment. In perceptual mapping respondents are provided with a map of an indoor or outdoor location and their feelings or perceptions about areas on the map are solicited. During this study students participating in regular…

A study investigated the influence of interpersonal variables, such as communicative competence, loneliness, and roommate rapport, upon persistence in college. The study includes self-reports as well as reports of roommates' behaviors. Subjects were 200 freshman students (out of a total of 350) who participated in several sections of a…

The process by which the student formulates conceptions of the university and the impact of this process on the decision to persist at the university were studied with first-time Mexican American college freshmen. A multiple-subject research design--a modified analytic induction technique--was employed in order to develop a descriptive model.…

Given that people's expectations influence their behavior, it is important to examine the expectations of incoming college freshman whose beliefs and hopes may help to determine their academic and social integration, which have been linked to persistence and retention rates. Of 212 African American freshman who completed the "University New…

A student engagement model is proposed to provide a conceptual framework for understanding the bond between student and college. The model focuses on a student's motivation for attending college, the tension that derives from conflicting motivations, and the social context of the student-college bond. The validity of the model was examined in a…

This study examined the characteristics and factors in the undergraduate experience that appeared to be most strongly associated with vitality in the classroom. Data were collected from 740 representative freshmen at a large research university by means of a university survey instrument that contained over 150 items in four categories: (1)…

Many adjustment problems may stem from the difference between initial expectations and later, experienced perceptions. To test this theory in relation to the social climate of university living units, and to assess initial perceptions and predictions of the future in relation to level of social exploration as a coping style, 92 entering freshmen…

The examination of the functioning of social networks has been used to understand how individual and environmental characteristics can mediate the availability of social support. To examine the relationship between personal attributes, psychosocial environmental attributes, and the interaction between these variables, 92 entering college freshmen…

The interactive influence of student characteristics and eight measures of student-faculty relationships on the prediction of freshman year voluntary persistence/withdrawal decisions was studied. A questionnaire was sent to the total population of incoming freshmen at a large, independent, residential university in New York State. Usable responses…

This study examined freshman college students' attitudes about date rape and how such attitudes changed over the course of their college experience. It is based on a subset of data from the 1990 annual national survey of freshmen and a follow-up study in 1994 collected by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) survey, namely 10,155…