Required introductory courses are as important as they are unloved. They are a key part of the general-education curriculum, which makes up as much as one-third of the typical baccalaureate student's education, and they are the subject of seemingly never-ending revitalization efforts. Many senior faculty members avoid teaching such courses because…

Among the traditional measures of student quality, class rank is widely described by admissions officers as the fuzziest. That is why some colleges no longer use it in their evaluations of applicants, while many others do not consider it very important. The measure once had greater appeal. For one thing, it had the whiff of fairness. Seeing how an…

Some students at University of Florida can take classes only during the spring and summer semesters for as long as they are enrolled. Each year they will get a four-month break--the fall semester--when they can take online courses, study abroad, or do internships. Some may opt to work. Despite their schedules, the students are full-fledged…

The handyman has a tool for everything, but the admissions dean is not so lucky: He must make do with just a few. Every year, presidents and professors expect freshmen who are curious, determined, and hungry for challenges. The traditional metrics of merit, however, can't reveal such qualities. Standardized-test scores may or may not predict a…

Dozens of universities have started encouraging students to go abroad early in their college life in the last decade, offering overseas opportunities that last a week to a full academic year, in countries as diverse as Britain, China, and Mexico. A variety of factors are driving the growth. Universities say the programs help globalize the…

At campuses across the country, freshmen are moving in and reluctant parents are moving on. Few of them enjoy the kind of welcome Rice provides for its 790 incoming freshmen. In this article, the author describes how Rice University welcomes its freshmen and shares some of the experiences the students had when student football athletes helped them…

In this article, the author relates his experiences as a second-time college freshman at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. The author is a college president over the age of 50. He was also a melanoma cancer survivor who had underwent a lung surgery and chemotherapy four summers earlier. Chris Nelson, president of St. John's, had agreed to…

The numbers looked strange. In early March, the University of Missouri had received many more campus-housing contracts than it expected. Each year many upperclassmen cancel their agreements after finding an off-campus rental, leaving enough spaces for incoming students. But on March 17, the first day freshmen could select their rooms online, there…

Don't drink too much, download pirated files, light candles, or prop open doors. Warnings like those pervade the weighty work of admonition known as the student handbook. However, Allen J. Bova wonders, "Who ever reads that?" So Mr. Bova, director of risk management and insurance at Cornell University, tried to reach students with a…

Three new studies of college freshmen suggest that even the most promising among them can run into academic difficulties as a long-term consequence of experiences like attending a violence-plagued high school or being raised by parents who never went to college. Two of the studies call into question a large body of research on the educational…

The authors decided to use Bob Dylan's 2004 memoir "Chronicles" as a text in their freshman humanities seminars at Villanova University, partly to illustrate to increasingly career-oriented students--prospective engineers, business majors, and the like--how a liberal education and exposure to classic literature are relevant to everyone, and partly…

According to a paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, first-year college students who are assigned roommates with video-game consoles study 40 minutes less per day, on average, than first-year students whose roommates did not bring consoles. And that reduction in study time has a sizable effect on grades: First-year students…

Debating annual front-page articles that focus almost exclusively on Ivy League colleges and other highly competitive institutions that reject the vast majority of their applicants, the author reports that, in 2007, 80 percent of current first-year students were admitted to their top-choice college, according to an annual survey of more than…

Freshmen are more concerned about academic quality and affordability than they have been in decades, according to an annual survey conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. Sixty-three percent of students said academic reputation was a very-important factor in selecting a college, an…

College freshmen are discussing politics more than they have in 40 years. A record proportion--23.9 percent--call themselves conservative, and not since 1975 have there been as many liberals, at 28.4 percent. This article reports on the findings coming from the annual national survey of freshmen conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute…