Anyone who teaches beginning college students knows how much they have changed in recent years. Today’s students are increasingly job-focused, skilled in using technology, and concerned about the future. And more than ever, students are worrying about how they will pay for college. Recently, popular media sources such as USA Today have raised questions about whether the money spent on a college degree would be better invested in a start-up business or travel.¹ While it is tempting to focus on the few individuals who can find an alternate path to a successful future, 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-year colleges, bringing with them hopes and dreams as well as expectations that may or may not be realistic. Your College Experience, Two-Year College Edition is designed specifically to give students in these colleges the practical help they need to gain self-knowledge, set goals, succeed, and persist so that those hopes and dreams have a better chance to become realities.

While keeping its approach on goal setting, the Two-Year College Edition adds skills and strategies in areas where two-year students often need the most support. These skills, such as time management, academic reading, and career preparation, are important for college courses and for the workplace. At a time when institutions are increasing class sizes and mainstreaming developmental students, students will need more, not less, individual attention and skills so that they can 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 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 and Test Bank. 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, will help 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 college success course is our level of commitment and deep understanding of our students. Although this edition of Your College Experience focuses specifically on the two-year college audience, it is still based on feedback from generations of users and 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 many valuable contributions from leading experts in the field. Our contributors were chosen for their knowledge and currency in their fields as well as their own deep commitments to their students and to the discipline. 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 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 specifically at two-year 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 every topic that our experience, our research, and our reviewers tell us is a concern for students at any type of two-year college with any kind of educational background. We have also embedded various reading and writing strategies to scaffold students’ efforts in comprehension of the material and application of skills presented in each chapter and included technology tools and tips that can enhance students’ studying experience.

This version of Your College Experience uses a simple and logical organization. Part One, First Steps, sets the stage by challenging students to explore their purpose for attending college, by helping them learn how to apply that purpose to both short- and long-term goal setting and to managing their complex lives. Students are armed with solid time, energy, and money management strategies in Chapter 2, and then they explore the topic of learning styles. Part Two, Study Strategies, enumerates essential study skills like, reading, note taking and test taking and guides students in finding information, writing and speaking. Part Three, Your Path to Success in College and Beyond, emphasizes critical thinking, and practical and realistic considerations such as managing emotional and physical health, and relationships in the diverse environments where students live and work. Part Three also includes a comprehensive chapter on majors and careers with a wealth of tools and strategies that students can use now and in the future.

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.