The Transition To College

This brief rhetoric introduces the essential reading and writing strategies students need to succeed in courses across the curriculum. Taking the transition from high school to college as his starting point, Hjortshoj speaks directly and honestly to students, offering them practical strategies to shed ineffective habits and move toward a more mature, flexible understanding of how to respond to academic challenges. Distilling information about writing assignments from across the curriculum, Hjortshoj shows students how to decode these assignments and approach them effectively. The second edition offers more advice on how to meet the difficult challenge of synthesizing and integrating sources, and the text has been streamlined to be a better reference.

An invaluable, thoughtfully written how-to-guide filled with practical words of advice for college-bound students and their families.

The transition from high school is challenging for any student, but for young adults with disabilities, it can be even more difficult. In addition to adjusting to increased academic demands in an environment where there is less structure and support, students have to navigate a disability services system that is very different from the one they knew in high school. But with the proper preparation, students can enjoy success! This practical guide explains how the system for accommodations works, describes students' rights and responsibilities within that system, and employs the voices of seasoned professionals and college students to explain the skills and strategies students should develop while they are in high school to ensure success when they reach college. As a bonus, it also offers answers to questions students with disabilities frequently ask about disclosing their disability in the admissions process.

When it was originally released, Thriving in Transitions: A Research-Based Approach to College Student Success represented a paradigm shift in the student success literature, moving the student success conversation beyond college completion to focus on student characteristics that promote high levels of academic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal performance in the college environment. The authors contend that a focus on remediating student characteristics or merely encouraging specific behaviors is inadequate to promote success in college and beyond. Drawing on research on college student thriving completed since 2012, the newly revised collection presents six research studies describing the characteristics that predict thriving in different groups of college students, including first-year students, transfer students, high-risk students, students of color, sophomores, and seniors, and offers recommendations for helping students thrive in college and life. New to this edition is a chapter focused on the role of faculty in supporting college student thriving.

Under increasing pressure to raise graduation rates and ensure that students leave high school college- and career-ready, many school and district leaders may believe that, when students graduate with college acceptances in hand, their work is done. But as Benjamin L. Castleman and Lindsay C. Page show, summer can be a time of significant attrition among college-intending seniors—especially those from low-income families. Anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of students presumed to be headed to college fail to matriculate at any postsecondary institution in the fall following high school. Summer Melt explores the complex factors that contribute to this trend—the absence of school support, confusion over paperwork, lack of parental guidance, and the teenage tendency to procrastinate. The authors draw on findings from fields such as neuroscience, behavioral economics, and social psychology to contextualize these factors. Drawing on a series of research studies, they show how schools and districts can develop effective, low-cost, scalable responses—including counselor outreach, peer mentoring, and using text messages and social media—to help students stay on track over the summer. Summer Melt offers very practical guidance for schools and districts committed to helping their students make the transition to college.

Erica Young Reitz helps college seniors and recent graduates navigate the complex transition to post-college life. Drawing on best practices and research on senior preparedness, this practical guide addresses the top issues graduates face: making decisions, finding friends, managing money, discerning your calling and much more.

Navigating the Transition from High School to College for Students with Disabilities provides effective strategies for navigating the transition process from high school into college for students with a wide range of disabilities. As students with disabilities attend two and four-year colleges in increasing numbers and through expanding access opportunities, challenges remain in helping these students and their families prepare for and successfully transition into higher education. Professionals and families supporting transition activities are often unaware of today’s new and rapidly developing options for postsecondary education. This practical guide offers user-friendly resources, including vignettes, research summaries, and hands-on activities that can be easily implemented in the classroom and in the community and that facilitate strong collaboration between schools and families. Preparation issues such as financial aid, applying for college, and other long-term planning areas are addressed in detail. An accompanying student resource section offers materials for high school students with disabilities that secondary educators, counselors, and transition personnel can use to facilitate exploration and planning discussions. Framing higher education as a possible transition goal for all students with disabilities, Navigating the Transition from High School to College for Students with Disabilities supports the postsecondary interests of more than four million public school students with disabilities.

The transition to university life challenges many first-year students who experience the normative issues of adjustment during this pivotal year. The Transition to University (T2U) program uses peer-led groups to provide support and information first-year students need in order to be academically and socially successful. This book is a manual for the T2U program that outlines weekly meetings for first-year students throughout their first year of university life. These meetings are co-led by advanced-level undergraduate students who facilitate discussion and offer support, advice, and strategies to be successful throughout the first year. The book also includes a description of a supervision practicum for the student leaders with assignments and suggested readings. Finally, it includes suggestions for assessing the effectiveness of the program. This book is meant to be used in conjunction with the student leadership book, Transition to Success: Training Students to Lead Peer Groups in Higher Education (Harper & Allegretti, 2018).

Universities are social universes in their own right. They are the site of multiple, complex and diverse social relations, identities, communities, knowledges and practices. At the heart of this book are people enrolling at university for the first time and entering into the broad variety of social relations and contexts entailed in their ‘coming to know’ at, of and through university. For some time now the terms ‘transition to university’ and ‘first-year experience’ have been at the centre of discussion and discourse at, and about, Australian universities. For those university administrators, researchers and teachers involved, this focus has been framed by a number of interlinked factors ranging from social justice concerns to the hard economic realities confronting the contemporary corporatising university. In the midst of changing global economic conditions affecting the international student market, as well as shifting domestic politics surrounding university funding, the equation of dollars with student numbers has remained a constant, and has kept universities’ attention on the current ‘three Rs’ of higher education — recruitment, retention, reward — and, in particular, on the critical phase of students’ entry into the tertiary institution environment. By recasting ‘the transition to university’ as simultaneously and necessarily entailing a transition of university — indeed universities — and of their many and varied constitutive relations, structures and practices, the contributors to this book seek to reconceptualise the ‘first-year experience’ in terms of multiple and dynamic processes of dialogue and exchange amongst all participants. They interrogate taken-for-granted understandings of what ‘the university’ is, and consider what universities might yet become.

This book offers two uniquely designed sections that provide a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research findings surrounding a diverse group of college students. The authors provide readers with valuable findings on topics such as student/faculty interactions, academic/social integration, and college preparation.