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The Hechinger Report
Some colleges start to confront a surprising reason students fail: Too many choices
As helicoptered students flounder, counselors step in with “metaphorical hand-holding”
By Jon Marcus
February 7, 2020
MIAMI — By the time Rodrigo Chinchon decided to change his major from
architecture, he was two years into college and 15 credits behind what
he would need for his new choice: international business.
“When I switched, I had a lot of requirements to fulfill. I was sort of
lost,” said Chinchon, a student at Florida International University.
It will take Chinchon an extra semester to earn his degree, and that’s
even after he took courses in the summers to catch up. Many other
students in his position just drop out.
With architecture, “It did seem like I had made the wrong choice,” he
said in a study area in the lobby of the university’s R. Kirk Landon
Undergraduate School of Business.
For generations of young people, going off to college was a step toward
independence. But for this generation, a surprising new problem is
thwarting their success: too many choices.
These students are increasingly the children of parents who
helicoptered them through elementary, middle and high school or who
didn’t go to college themselves and can’t provide much help with it.
For these and other reasons, some take courses they don’t need, pick
majors they will later change and don’t know what to do when the
resulting problems leave them on the brink of flunking out.
“We have a lot of students who, whether they are helicoptered or
they’re first generation, they don’t know how to college,” said Aaron
Weiss, dean of science and math at Lorain County Community College in
Ohio, using “college” as a verb.
Now some institutions that once let students sink or swim are trying to
confront this problem by taking critical choices away from them. A
small but growing number of schools have even started picking their
students’ first-year courses for them. They’re also monitoring them as
closely as their parents might have for signs that they’re falling into
trouble, and stepping in as needed to painstakingly shepherd them to
graduation.
At FIU, arriving freshmen in the business school are now being put
through a newly revamped required course that helps make sure they’ve
made the best decision — “to really look at, are they in the right
major, and having them start to think about that earlier,” said Richard
Klein, associate dean of the undergraduate school of business.
“I can’t have them get to junior year and decide they don’t want to be
an accounting major,” Klein said. “They might be here an extra year if
they make those decisions very late.”
The school has also started limiting the number of times a student can
drop a class and then take it again to get a better grade — an easy out
but yet another kind of bad decision that costs extra time and money.
Before the restrictions were imposed, Klein said, one FIU undergraduate
had started and then dropped the same course 13 times.
“Part of what we’ve begun to do is rein back some of the choices that allow these students to get into trouble,” Klein said.
That’s among the reasons that the business school’s on-time graduation
rate has jumped from 31 percent to 45 percent in just two years, he
said.
Meredith College in North Carolina has gone even further. It’s one of a
handful of institutions that has begun choosing incoming students’
courses for them.
In the past, said Brandon Stokes, director of retention and student
success at Meredith, “some students, especially considering how
anxiety has crept into higher education, would have a horrible
experience and even be paralyzed by the stress” of picking their own
schedules.
Left to fend for themselves, they often settled for whatever was
available, whether or not it was of interest or counted toward their
majors.
“Colleges are starting to view these young women and men as emerging
adults who need a lot more hand-holding than we used to give them,”
Stokes said.
Rather than resenting having her choice of courses limited, said
Meredith student Abigail Crooks, she welcomed it. Now a senior, Crooks
“was anxiety-ridden coming to college. I was dealing with a new
roommate and being away from home. Having that structure really helped
me.”
Institutions including the California Institute of the Arts have begun
what CalArts associate provost for student success Anna Jablonski calls
“metaphorical hand-holding,” in which students who are starting to slip
get pulled in for face-to-face meetings with advisers and faculty
mentors rather than being allowed to drift away and drop out.
Counselors follow up by not only monitoring the students’ progress, but
by sending encouraging messages about good work.
These students’ parents “were a lot more involved” in their educations
than was the case in previous generations, said Jablonski. “This is
just how they’ve been raised and what they’ve come to expect. So
college has become more like the K-12 experience, where we are teaching
them how to be adults in the world.”
Without such intervention, Jablonski said, some students sit and sulk
in their rooms, immobilized and spiraling downward until it’s too late
to redeem them.
“That’s exactly what can and does happen,” she said. “It was happening
here, and I think it still happens at other schools, big and small.”
Students whose parents didn’t go to college find themselves equally
anxiety-prone about the many choices they are quickly forced to make.
Alexa Hercules, another FIU student, now in her last semester, said
that arriving as a freshman “was a little overwhelming because I’m
first generation, so when it came to picking classes, I was a little
bit lost.”
She also sometimes questioned her major, business administration and
marketing. The requirements are tough, including math. Sometimes,
Hercules said, “I’m just, ‘Really, Alexa, why did you have to choose
marketing?’ ” Now she plans to continue on to law school, but with
marketing as a backup plan.
Lorain is among several colleges experimenting with text “nudges” to
students who may not seek help on their own. The texts, akin to
parental nagging, include reminders about taking advantage of
instructors’ office hours, managing finances and using the colleges’
food bank. At first aimed solely at science, technology, engineering
and math majors, they appear to have kept some from quitting; in a test
run, 28 percent of students who received nudges dropped out after the
first semester, compared to 44 percent who chose not to receive the
nudges. Lorain has since expanded the effort to all of its
undergraduates.
Many of those students “don’t know how to manage things, they feel
overwhelmed, they don’t necessarily want to ask for help,” said Weiss,
who oversees the program. “They don’t know how to be independent
learners and critical thinkers. That should not shock anyone. Those are
not necessarily skills that they’re learning in K-12 education.”
A lot of students can’t make up their minds about a major, either.
About a third change their majors at least once, the U.S. Department of
Education says, and one in 10 switches majors two or more times.
For that matter, more students than ever second-guess their choices
about where to even go to college. Thirty-seven percent now transfer at
least once in their college careers, according to the National Student
Clearinghouse Research Center, which tracks this; of those, nearly half
switch schools more than once.
All of this takes a toll on graduation rates. Undergraduates, on
average, end up taking 15 credits more than they need to get degrees —
a full semester’s worth — according to the advocacy group Complete
College America. And that, in turn, is why nearly 60 percent take
longer than four years to finish, or never do.
The numbers are even worse at community colleges. Getting a two-year
associate degree takes four years, on average, for the students who
stick around long enough to do it; graduates end up with more than 22
excess credits, or a semester and a half’s worth.
College is in part a chance for students to explore their interests,
which means taking at least some elective courses that don’t count
toward their majors, said Ed Bush, president of Cosumnes River College,
a community college in California. “But there’s a clear difference
between exploration and being lost.”
Instead of letting its students choose their first-year schedules, this
fall, Cosumnes, too, started doing it for them. The students still get
to select the days and times of the classes they take.
Before this change, nearly 60 percent of students at Cosumnes weren’t
graduating even after six years, according to the most recent data from
the college. Early indications suggest this number will improve, Bush
said. “We knew that in order to solve a drastic problem, the solutions
also had to be drastic,” he said.
Even if students were laser-focused, higher education institutions
themselves have subjected them to what sociologists call “choice
overload” by hugely increasing the number of courses and majors they
offer.
Partly to attract enrollment, which has been declining, colleges and
universities nationwide added 55,416 new programs in the five years
ending in 2017, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of the most
recent available federal figures. Cosumnes has 2,771 credit-bearing
classes in 100 degree and certificate programs.
“Students walk in and it’s kind of like they’re in a cafeteria,” said
Vikash Reddy, senior director of policy research at the Campaign for
College Opportunity, citing research about one of the principal reasons
students flounder. “They can pick something from here and something
from there, but it doesn’t always add up to a meal.”
Or, in this case, to a degree.
“Choice is good. It doesn’t follow from that that more choice is always
better,” said Barry Schwartz, professor of social theory and social
action at Swarthmore College and the author of “The Paradox of Choice,”
about the psychological ramifications of a supermarket culture that
offers 175 kinds of salad dressings and 275 breakfast cereals.
Colleges “are probably right from a marketing point of view to
advertise the million different ways you can go through the
institution. That will appeal to 18-year-olds,” Schwartz said. “But it
won’t appeal to them when it’s time for them to make decisions.”
This is increasingly true among high school graduates less accustomed to forging their own paths, he said.
“What magic thing happened during the summer that turned these
infantile teenagers into mature adults? Nothing,” Schwartz said. For
them, he said, too many choices can lead to “paralysis rather than
liberation.”
University administrators say parents increasingly involve themselves
in almost every aspect of their children’s lives, even in college.
“At the beginning, having a student call their parents during a meeting
that we’re in together kind of made me laugh,” said Allison Farrell,
assistant dean for student success at Le Moyne College in New York.
Now, said Farrell, “I find that I talk to parents at least once a day.”
The resulting sense of dependence this creates for many students has
led Le Moyne, too, to begin selecting first-semester classes for them.
And like several other institutions, it has put into place an early
alert system under which faculty, staff and administrators watch for
anyone who may be struggling, instead of waiting for them to ask for
help. A committee gathers every Thursday morning in a conference room
in the library to review these cases.
“We definitely see students who don’t have the coping skills that we
would hope they would have at this point,” said Becki Lawhorn, director
of retention research and analytics at the University of Dayton, which
added its own “academic intervention response team” in the fall.
“They’re just not prepared to handle things for themselves.”
At Meredith, students who are performing poorly in class, not making
friends or suggesting in occasional college-wide surveys that they’re
having problems are assigned someone they trust to check on and talk to
them.
And at Loyola University in New Orleans, an alarm is triggered if a
student requests a transcript, signaling that he or she may be about to
withdraw. Not only do advisers, tutors, career counselors and coaches
reach out; even the student government is alerted, said Liz Rainey,
executive director of student success.
One of those students was Emmett Parker III— he goes by Trey — who was
on the verge of quitting Loyola last summer and transferring to a
community college in his home state of Massachusetts.
At his Catholic private high school, Parker said, “Your teacher told
you to do this and to do that.” But when he got to college, “There’s a
million choices that you have to make. I had never had experience with
doing that. I started to freak out, [thinking] ‘What am I supposed to
be doing?’ ”
Parker’s mother hadn’t gone to college, he said, and he hesitated to
ask for help from faculty or staff. “For me there was always a little
bit of ego, a little bit of embarrassment. I didn’t want to be that kid
who couldn’t do college.”
So when counselors reached out to him, said Parker, “It was just a
weight off my shoulders. I wasn’t having to carry this burden any more.
It was honestly like somebody pulling me out from drowning.”
Now a junior who is back on track and majoring in political science,
Parker said, “To have someone hold my hand like that, not in a childish
way but as in, ‘I’ve got you, I can help you,’ was extremely helpful.”
Colleges have self-interested reasons for monitoring their students so
closely, and sometimes limiting their choices. One is that it’s cheaper
to keep students from dropping out than it is to recruit new students.
Another: Consumers are increasingly conscious of low graduation rates.
“If a student doesn’t finish, “that is failure, and it’s failure that we as the institution own,” said Klein, at FIU.
Not every student needs a surrogate parent. “Sometimes they just want
to have something explained to them and then they’re good. They’re on
their way,” said Cy Gage, an academic adviser at CalArts. “With other
students, you have to build up a level of trust so they’re comfortable
coming in and talking to you, and not just about school, but also,
‘Hey, did you eat today, and did you get any sleep?’ ”
Rodrigo Chinchon wishes his advisers at FIU had checked on him more, not less — especially when his GPA briefly slipped.
“An email would have been nice. I do wish they had reached out more.”
He regained his footing, however. Now he’s thinking of combining his
business credentials with what he learned from his abandoned
architecture major to develop and design real estate.
Of course, by hovering over their students in these ways, colleges and
universities risk being criticized for practicing the same paternalism
that’s been causing the problems in the first place.
But “if there is expertise within an institution that knows there are
better, easier, shorter paths to getting degrees, it seems smart to set
up the architecture of the institution such that those choices are
easier to make,” said Michael Weiss, senior research associate at the
social policy research organization MDRC, who studies this.
“There have got to be some students for whom too much choice is causing
trouble,” Weiss said. “If there are 500 different majors and all these
different courses to choose from, that can be overwhelming. In those
cases I’m not worried that you’re coddling people too much.”
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