Anyone who teaches beginning college students knows how much they have changed in recent years. Today’s students are increasingly job focused, technologically adept, and concerned about the future. More than ever, students worry about how they will pay for college. Recently, popular media sources such as the Washington Post have raised questions about whether the benefits of college are worth the cost.¹ While it is tempting to focus on the few individuals who succeed without finishing college, we know that for the overwhelming majority of individuals, a college degree is more essential than ever before.

Today, we see diverse students of all ages and backgrounds enrolling in two– and four–year public and private institutions, bringing with them the hopes and dreams that a college education can help fulfill—as well as expectations that may or may not be realistic. Your College Experience is designed specifically to give all students the practical help they need to gain self-knowledge, set goals, succeed, and stay in college so that those hopes and dreams have a better chance of becoming realities.

While maintaining its approach on goal setting, the twelfth edition of this text offers a new emphasis on the ten high-impact practices identified by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and it now incorporates information on the value of peer leaders in supporting students. Your College Experience teaches skills and strategies in areas where students often need the most help and that are critical for success in college and the workplace. These include time management, academic reading, test taking, research, and career preparation. At a time when institutions are increasing class sizes and mainstreaming developmental students, students will need more individual attention and the skills to ask for the help they need. Of course, concerns about student retention remain, as do pressures on college success administrators to do more with less. These realities of college and university life mean that giving students strategies they can use immediately is more important than ever.

To help you meet the challenges of engaging and retaining today’s students, we have created a complete package of support materials, including an Instructor’s Annotated Edition and an Instructor’s Manual. In the Instructor’s Annotated Edition, you will find clearly marked retention strategies and activities to help you engage and retain students. These activities, and all of the instructor support materials, are valuable for both new and experienced instructors as they prepare to teach the course.

What has not changed in the forty years since the inception of the first-year seminar is our level of commitment to and deep understanding of our students. Although this edition of Your College Experience has been significantly revised, it is still based on our collective knowledge and experience in teaching new students. It is grounded in the growing body of research on student success and retention and includes valuable contributions from leading experts in the field. Most of all, it is a text born from our devotion to students and to their success. Simply put, we do not like to see students fail. We are confident that if students both read and heed the information herein, they will become engaged in the college experience, learn, and persist to graduation.

We have written this text for students of any age in both residential and commuter institutions. Our writing style is intended to convey respect and admiration for students while recognizing their continued need for challenge and support. We have addressed topics that our experience, our research, and our reviewers tell us are concerns for students at any type of college or university and with any kind of educational background. We have also embedded various reading and writing strategies to support students’ efforts to comprehend the material and apply the skills presented in each chapter, and we have included technology tools and tips that can enhance students’ studying experience.

Your College Experience uses a simple and logical organization. Part One, Foundations, sets the stage by challenging students to explore their purpose for attending college and by helping them learn how to apply that purpose to both short- and long-term goal setting. Students are armed with solid time-management strategies in Chapter Two, and then they explore the topics of emotional intelligence and learning styles. Part Two, Preparing to Learn, enumerates essential learning skills like critical thinking, reading, note taking, studying, and test taking, and guides students in communicating and finding information. Part Three, Preparing for Life, emphasizes practical and realistic considerations such as relationships, diversity, wellness, and money management. Part Four, Next Steps, features a comprehensive chapter on majors and careers with a wealth of tools and strategies that students can use during their first-year experience and beyond.

Whether you are considering this textbook for use in your first-year seminar or have already made a decision to adopt it, we thank you for your interest, and we trust that you will find it to be a valuable teaching aid. We also hope that this book will guide you and your campus in understanding the broad range of issues that can affect student success.