Why the First-Year Seminar Matters: Helping Students Choose and Stay on a Career Path provides an overview of the Guided Pathways movement and the critical role that the first-year seminar can play in setting the stage for student success. After reviewing the extensive history and research on first-year seminars, Harrington and Orosz suggest that the time is right for colleges and universities to re-imagine the first-year seminar course within the Guided Pathways framework. More specifically, by increasing the focus on career exploration and decision-making and addressing key success skills students need, the first-year seminar can serve as an essential foundational element of Guided Pathways. Readers will find the practical suggestions on how to engage in backward course redesign and the making the case data helpful as they aim to address equity gaps and require this course of all incoming first-year students.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From Academy Award–nominated actress and 2023 SeeHer award recipient America Ferrera comes a vibrant and varied collection of first-person accounts from prominent figures about the experience of growing up between cultures. America Ferrera has always felt wholly American, and yet, her identity is inextricably linked to her parents’ homeland and Honduran culture. Speaking Spanish at home, having Saturday-morning-salsa-dance-parties in the kitchen, and eating tamales alongside apple pie at Christmas never seemed at odds with her American identity. Still, she yearned to see that identity reflected in the larger American narrative. Now, in American Like Me, America invites thirty-one of her friends, peers, and heroes to share their stories about life between cultures. We know them as actors, comedians, athletes, politicians, artists, and writers. However, they are also immigrants, children or grandchildren of immigrants, indigenous people, or people who otherwise grew up with deep and personal connections to more than one culture. Each of them struggled to establish a sense of self, find belonging, and feel seen. And they call themselves American enthusiastically, reluctantly, or not at all. Ranging from the heartfelt to the hilarious, their stories shine a light on a quintessentially American experience and will appeal to anyone with a complicated relationship to family, culture, and growing up.

The responsibility for college success has historically rested with the student, but since the 1980s, educators have taken increasing ownership of this, designing structures that increase the likelihood of learning, success, and retention. These efforts have included a variety of initiatives--first year seminars, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, common intellectual experiences, service-learning, undergraduate research, and senior capstones among others--that have come to be known as high-impact practices. Although first year seminars have been widely accepted as a high impact educational practice leading to improved academic performance, increased retention and acquisition of critical 21st Century outcomes, first-year seminars tend to be loosely defined in the literature. National explorations of course structure and administration demonstrate the diversity of the curricular initiatives across various campuses. In order to determine the attributes that all of these varied courses share in common that contribute to their effectiveness, the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition at the University of South Carolina invited contributions for a book exploring effective educational practices within the first-year seminar. This collection of case studies represents a wide variety of institutional and seminar types. The authors describe the structure, pedagogy, and assessment strategies that lead to high quality seminars and they offer abundant models for ensuring the delivery of a high-quality educational experience to all entering students. The table of contents includes the following: (1) Structural Supports for Effective Educational Practices in the First-Year Seminar (Tracy L. Skipper); (2) The American University of Rome (Jenny Petrucci); (3) Cabrini University (Richard Gebauer, Michelle Filling-Brown, and Amy Perischetti); (4) Clark University (Jessica Bane Robert); (5) Coastal Carolina University (Michele C. Everett); (6) Durham Technical Community College (Kerry F. Cantwell and Gabby McCutchen); (7) Florida South Western State College (Eileen DeLuca, Kathy Clark, Myra Walters, and Martin Tawil); (8) Indiana University--Purdue University Indianapolis (Heather Bowman, Amy Powell, and Cathy Buyarski); (9) Ithaca College (Elizabeth Bleicher); (10) LaGuardia Community College, CUNY (Tameka Battle, Linda Chandler, Bret Eynon, Andrea Francis, Preethi Radhakrishnan, and Ellen Quish); (11) Loyola University Maryland (Mary Ellen Wade); (12) Malone University (Marcia K. Everett, Jay R. Case, and Jacci Welling); (13) Montana State University (Margaret Konkel and Deborah Blanchard); (14) Northern Arizona University (Rebecca Campbell and Kaitlin Hublitz); (15) Southern Methodist University (Caitlin Anderson, Takeshi Fujii, and Donna Gober); (16) Southwestern Michigan College (Christi Young, Jeffrey Dennis, and Donald Ludman); (17) St. Cloud State University (Christine Metzo); (18) Texas A & M University-Corpus Christi (Rita A. Sperry, Andrew M. Garcia, Chelsie Hawkinson, and Michelle Major); (19) The University of Arizona (Marla Franco, Jessica Hill, and Tina Wesanen-Neil); (20) University of Kansas (Alison Olcott Marshall and Sarah Crawford-Parker); (21) University of Maryland Baltimore County (Lisa Carter Beall); (22) University of New Hampshire (Neil Niman, Tamara Rury, and Sean Stewart); (23) University of North Carolina Wilmington (Zachary W. Underwood); (24) University of Northern Iowa (Deirdre Heistad, April Chatham-Carpenter, Kristin Moser, and Kristin Woods); (25) University of Texas at Austin (Ashley N. Stone and Tracie Lowe); (26) University of Texas at San Antonio (Kathleen Fugate Laborde and Tammy Jordan Wyatt); (27) University of Wisconsin-Madison (Susan Brantly and Sorabh Singhal); (28) Virginia Commonwealth University (Melissa C. Johnson and Bety Kreydatus); and (29) Conclusion: What Does It Mean to Be High Impact? (Tracy L. Skipper). (Individual chapters contain references.).

Many colleges and universities have begun using the language of vocation, which originates in Christian theology, to help undergraduates think about their futures. The contributors to this volume seek to reexamine and re-think this language for the contemporary multi-faith context.

The definitive career guide for grad students, adjuncts, post-docs and anyone else eager to get tenure or turn their Ph.D. into their ideal job Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their Ph.D. And each year only a small percentage of them will land a job that justifies and rewards their investment. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many more who simply give up in frustration. Those who do make it share an important asset that separates them from the pack: they have a plan. They understand exactly what they need to do to set themselves up for success. They know what really moves the needle in academic job searches, how to avoid the all-too-common mistakes that sink so many of their peers, and how to decide when to point their Ph.D. toward other, non-academic options. Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help readers join the select few who get the most out of their Ph.D. As a former tenured professor and department head who oversaw numerous academic job searches, she knows from experience exactly what gets an academic applicant a job. And as the creator of the popular and widely respected advice site The Professor is In, she has helped countless Ph.D.’s turn themselves into stronger applicants and land their dream careers. Now, for the first time ever, Karen has poured all her best advice into a single handy guide that addresses the most important issues facing any Ph.D., including: -When, where, and what to publish -Writing a foolproof grant application -Cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV -Acing the job talk and campus interview -Avoiding the adjunct trap -Making the leap to nonacademic work, when the time is right The Professor Is In addresses all of these issues, and many more.

This publication¿the latest report from AAC&U¿s Liberal Education and America¿s Promise (LEAP) initiative¿defines a set of educational practices that research has demonstrated have a significant impact on student success. Author George Kuh presents data from the National Survey of Student Engagement about these practices and explains why they benefit all students, but also seem to benefit underserved students even more than their more advantaged peers. The report also presents data that show definitively that underserved students are the least likely students, on average, to have access to these practices.

In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list. Academically Adrift holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents—all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa’s report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.