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. And more than ever, students are worrying about how they will pay for college. In recent months, 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 travel¹. While it is tempting to focus on the few individuals who can chart 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 both two- and four-year 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 to become realities.

While maintaining its hallmark approach on goal setting, the eleventh edition of this text reflects a renewed emphasis on providing skills and strategies in areas where students often need the most support. These skills, such as time management, academic reading, and research, can be applied to all college courses and even to the workplace. At a time when institutions are increasing class sizes and mainstreaming developmental students, students will need more, not less, individual attention and the skills so that they can ask for this attention. And of course concerns about student retention remain as do pressures on first-year experience administrators to do more with less. These realities of college and university life mean that giving students strategies for immediate use 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, 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 has been significantly revised, it is still based on our collective knowledge and experience in teaching first-year students, as well as on feedback from generations of users. 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 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 two- and four-year 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 every topic that our experience, our research, and our reviewers tell us is a concern for students at any type of school with any kind of educational background.

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 Study, enumerates essential study skills like critical thinking, reading, note taking 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. The new 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.