Why Freshmen Fail

High school students today have more difficulty than ever before in being admitted to college. How does it happen, then, that the dropout rate among college freshmen is steadily increasing? For an analysis of this enigmatic situation we turn toHAROLD G. RIDLON,assistant professor of English at Tafts University, Massachusetts, who in the past twelve years has taught students at levels ranging from the eighth grade through graduate school.

SO MUCH emphasis is placed on both the desirability and the difficulty of getting into college that students, parents, and teachers are to be forgiven if, in their joyful enthusiasm, they minimize the problems of staying in college during the first year and doing satisfactory work. Students have been dropping out of colleges, either of their own volition or at the suggestion of the administration, as long as there has been such a phenomenon as higher education. But the dropout rate today is increasing at the very time when, we are told, the colleges are accepting the “cream of the crop.” Even for those who ultimately do survive, the problem of adjusting to the first term of college can be a harrowing experience. Though admissions officers tell us that the new freshmen are better and better in the ways that are measurable, many of us have a lurking suspicion that the battery of tests and other data college administrators depend on fall far short of revealing student originality, inventiveness, or capacity for intellectual growth under the demanding stimuli of the first weeks of college.

This problem affects not only those who might very likely flunk out in the first year; it also troubles students perfectly able both to survive college and to enjoy it, whose first year, at least — and perhaps more — is passed in morbid fear of failure.

This group of students come to college with high test scores, solid high school grades, and firm recommendations. Why do they fail to achieve? It is my impression, gained from close contact for the past decade with such college students, that the reasons for their ineffectiveness fall roughly into two categories: skills and attitudes.

The relationship of good reading skills to success in college is primary. I do not wish to raise here the issue about the extent to which precollege students are or are not being taught to read effectively. Nor do I wish to disinter the bones of the old phonics versus word-by-word debate. I say only that a great many entering college students fail to get out of their reading what generally reasonable and understanding faculties feel they should get.

Needless to say, with the great bulk of reading required of the average college student today, speed is vitally necessary. The student who plods along through all types of reading material at two hundred words a minute will undoubtedly lag behind another who can average four hundred or more and can vary his speed from two to six, depending on the material read. Contrary to what students — and parents — generally believe, the more rapid reader is likely to be the better reader, for the simple reason that he can more closely approximate the thought patterns of the writer. The reader who splits a simple idea that may cover three or four sentences into forty or fifty words, or, worse, 150 to 200 syllables, erects barriers for himself that, if not insurmountable, are, to say the least, inhibiting.

Training — even intelligent self-training like that advocated by Professor Robert Bear at Dartmouth College, in which for fifteen minutes a day the student forces himself to read some piece of relatively easy nonfiction much more rapidly than is comfortable for him — such training undertaken during the senior year of high school or in the summer before entering college could loosen up the rigid patterns of reading some students have developed during high school.

And “loosen up” is, I think, an appropriate term, for one common failure of reading training in high school is the insistence on the value of deep reading at the expense of broad reading. One might be forgiven here for citing Dr. Johnson, who, piqued on one occasion by the searching questions of a gentleman who had read a book the good doctor obviously had not read thoroughly, eyed him askance and asked scathingly, “Sir, do you read books through?” High school students often read through such books as Vanity Fair, Crime and Punishment, and David Copperfield so dutifully that they lose the valuable gift of flexibility.

One useful method to achieve flexibility is to devote a few minutes each day for a month to reading from a number of different sources, the only stipulation being that no two sources — book, newspaper, periodical — be repeated within the given period. No requirement should be set for finishing any article, story, or chapter, unless it proves so interesting that the reader chooses to complete it on his own time, outside the period devoted to the daily practice. The student should read in sources normally not explored: newspapers never read, specialized periodicals outside his field of interest, books by authors assiduously avoided.

Many entering college students read the back of a cereal box with the same rapt attention they give to a chapter in a physics book. But the loosening up, the relaxing, requires a psychological effort, a kind of commitment to ease. I am here reminded of the poor reader in the one-room country schoolhouse of many years ago who used to depend on his deskmate for help in the painful oral reading then thought so necessary. Once, however, stuck on a difficult passage, he leaned hopefully toward his mentor, only to have him say, because he didn’t know the words either, “Skip it, Richard, and go on.” Straightening up confidently after this exchange, he intoned to the world, ”Skip it, Richard, and go on.” The freshman could do worse than learn that there are many times when he, too, should skip it and go on.

One immediate application of this principle occurs in the area of prereading. To many freshmen, the notion of attacking a textbook chapter in three successive steps, each built on the preceding one, comes as the revelation of a secret sin, for they have been somehow led to believe that knowing how the chapter ends will spoil it for them. Instead of plodding laboriously for two hours from the beginning to the end of a twentypage chapter, they should spend, first, only fifteen minutes prereading the chapter, making a rapid survey, noting the title, observing the general format. They should read only first and last paragraphs, opening sentences of paragraphs, marginal headings, and boldface type. Then, on the basis of this survey, they should ask themselves questions they hope to be able to answer at the next reading.

The second reading, of, say, half an hour, involves some effort to isolate key ideas, scan all the paragraphs rapidly, and form more incisive and useful questions for the third, and last, reading.

Finally, the close-study reading permits concentration on the most significant data and clears away all the deadwood for a more meaningful reconciliation between fact and idea. Students uniformly testify to the efficacy of this system.

SECOND skill, valuable if not actually necessary for reasonable success in college, is the ability to listen constructively. Some effort is made in high school to develop the other three communication skills — reading, writing, and speaking — through oral and written presentations. But listening, although students engage in it for a good part of their time, is hopelessly neglected as a particular skill requiring systematic training and controlled practice.

What do students really hear as they sit in the classroom? College teachers discover in examinations how distorted the remarks made in class can become, even with the better students. This is another symptom of the broader problem, the difficulty of the new student in trying to adjust to an alien world.

Whether from large or small, public or private schools, most entering college students have come to be accepted on something like their own terms. Take, for example, the matter of the congenitally bad speller. Called to task for his appalling spelling, he will say with a jocular and casual air: “Oh, yes, I had this trouble all through high school, but the teachers didn’t seem to take it too seriously.” Yet, recently an instructor in freshman English told me of having to fail a boy primarily for the irresponsible inconsistency of his spelling.

Why had the student been permitted — I almost said “encouraged” — to complete high school without mastering a basic tool of communication? The answer is not far to seek: the high school student doing A or B work may be cajoled, shamed, or harangued into some concern for his spelling, but, according to modern teaching methods, he should never be forced by the exigency of the occasion into doing the necessary work. In almost all cases spelling can be improved tremendously, but it takes laborious and patient effort on the part of teacher and learner alike. Consequently, the student’s poor spelling has been passed on to the college along with his respectable high school grades and his genial personality. This particular student assumed that the college, too, would have to condone his orthographic eccentricities.

This same conviction of self-importance affects the power of the student to comprehend what he hears outside the orbit of his own relatively narrow concerns. Active listening involves an outgoing, sympathetic regard for others, a genuine desire to hear what others have to say.

Another important aspect of college readiness is the skill of candid, dispassionate, objective thinking. Good thought, like good reading, demands a sharp distinction between what is important and what is relatively unimportant. We could not remember and use even as much as we do if we did not forget infinitely more than we remember. Similarly, college work prompts the student, through the essay question, for instance, to relate concrete detail to general principle. Such a relation provides a structure necessary to the assimilation of facts and ideas. Without the power and training to think clearly, no such pattern is possible.

But quality of thought is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to measure accurately. Perhaps in our standardized testing we have underestimated the young student’s ability to outwit the test and have tended to confuse cleverness with wisdom. This may explain why it is that so many of our incoming freshmen seem inadequately trained to think, independently of prescribed modes and patterns of belief. For conviction, no matter how resolute it may be, is not thought. Conviction grows by accumulation, adding layer upon layer of comforting accretions; thought, on the other hand, strips bare, denudes, reduces to grim but tidy skeletons the chubby securities of the mind. Conviction may grow from thought, but thought only rarely from conviction.

And this, perhaps, is the paradox of education in America. The secondary schools often encourage students to erect edifices of warped and distorted personal convictions which the colleges must take time to demolish and then rebuild under the long, stabilizing shadow of history.

WHAT are the attitudes which block successful and satisfying completion of the freshman year? The obstacles all revolve around the central pole of self-consciousness. Fear, anxiety, selfishness, aggressiveness, timidity, lethargy — these often spring from unwholesome conceptions of the relationship between self and society. And the first year of college often triggers reactions frighteningly consistent with patterns of behavior which the precollege home and school have conspired to create.

Secondary schools in a free society are dedicated to the principle that all the citizens deserve to be, need to be educated. It is their task to devise education suitable for the wide ranges of ability they encounter year after year. Thus, increasingly the responsibility has fallen to them not only for making a student “fit in” (an ugly expression, as Henri Peyre points out) but, more important in this context, for making him know that he fits in. Consequently, we have witnessed in the public schools over the past forty years a proliferation of course offerings appalling in its implications. The colleges and universities, on the other hand, have, for an equally long period, functioned on the Jeffersonian principle of aristocracy of talent and have with cavalier detachment dismissed students unable or unwilling to profit from the programs they offer, though even colleges have sometimes illustrated the trend by offering the type of course referred to as “Underwater Basket Weaving.”

By and large, however, the conflict that exists between the aims of the high school and the aims of the college has produced a strain most painfully felt by the incoming college student. The two conflicting principles find their battleground in his distressed frame, and the agues that torture him ought not to be taken lightly by parent, teacher, or administrator. We have found our own equivalent of a primitive initiation rite.

The student who encounters difficulties far out of proportion to those predictable from high school record, aptitude tests, and achievement tests will often be found psychologically insecure. His insecurity, produced by many different factors, manifests itself in various ways. One of the most common of these is anxiety.

Anxiety of one kind or another is as common to adolescence as the appearance of secondary sex characteristics, and it should never be forgotten that college students, particularly freshmen, are still shoulder deep in the quicksand of adolescence. Thus, anxiety is a regular part of their travelingequipment. Often, of course, it reveals itself constructively in their thoughts and actions. It may spur them to solve some troublesome problem; it may aggravate a mild discontent with some human situation into a profound commitment to shatter a specious status quo. Anxiety for the physical health or social well-being of others may, if properly directed, motivate the freshman toward medicine or sociology as a career. As recent studies indicate, anxiety may be a potent factor in the learning process itself.

But an anxiety that turns itself morbidly inward, that prompts the student to dwell dangerously on his failures and shortcomings is of no real value to him or to anyone else. Soon he begins seriously to question his ability to survive. Such an awareness, coming so swiftly on the heels of all the well-wishing he has received from relatives, friends, and teachers, may initiate a depression the more dangerous because it does not always find a proper outlet for expression. What will happen when he flunks out? How can he face his family and friends? One can sympathize with his plight, for, ironically, our society attaches more shame to one asked to leave college than to one who was never accepted. Americans, generally speaking, prize success, champion the obvious underdog, and have no patience with failure.

Another reason for the student’s anxiety at this point is his conviction that the college is cold, unfeeling, and impersonal in its attitude toward him. Relatively speaking, of course, this is true. The climate of acceptance is chilly. To most of his instructors, the freshman is little more than a name, especially in those larger courses that fall to his lot. What the student often fails to realize, however, is that all the machinery is there for his liberation, but he himself must spring the lock on the cage. One student who failed to do this throughout an entire year in a course given by a colleague of mine earned for himself the written comment: “He sits somewhere in the middle of the room.”

Added to the student’s frustration is his sense of guilt that he has failed to do what was expected of him, what he ought to be able to do, for he himself is also a victim of that bland propaganda which has cozened others into thinking he will have no trouble at all if he simply applies himself. He begins to think of the debts he owes to others, and he shrinks before the prospect of his failure to repay them. If he is on a scholarship, he must maintain respectable grades or pay his own way, something neither he nor his family is prepared to do. Faced with this dilemma, the conscientious but ill-adjusted student suffers.

Beginning students often evidence anxiety through a lethargy which further inhibits their ability to perform effectively. Because they are deeply conscious of it themselves, it serves to enmesh them more inextricably in feelings of guilt and remorse. One contributing factor here is the radical difference in programing between high school and college. The average high school student meets most of his four or five major courses five times a week. His day-to-day study picture may change, but he has, over a period of years, developed a way to work, accommodating certain definite study hours.

In college there is a completely new concept of study hours: major courses meet every other day. three times a week; no tight social pattern; not even part-time work, the ballast that helps confine and arbitrate the weekly schedule for many high school students. Consequently, the freshman often experiences a very real letdown in his first few weeks of classes. He is lulled into a false sense of leisure by leaving, let us say, his French class at eleven on Tuesday and knowing it will not meet again until ten on Thursday. He feels no pressing need to begin the assignment that day. But each hour that slips by leaves him less eager and less prepared to cope with it. A fairly rigid study schedule created early in the first term and adhered to as closely as possible can save considerable heartache and headache later, but few students are prepared to take the initiative in this matter, and there are all too few advisers to recommend such a procedure.

IN SPITE of the pitfalls, the great majority of entering college students not only survive the first year but also derive considerable pleasure from the experience. How can the college help them?

At my university, students are given without charge, during the regular school year, a six-week reading and study improvement course, offered through the counseling staff. At first, speed and comprehension of reading are aimed for; then the reading skills are put to work in study situations: reading college textbooks, note taking on reading and lectures, planning of papers, use of the library, the technique of examination taking, with special emphasis on the essay examination, and a close analysis of special problems in college reading material.

Essentially the same course, though considerably expanded, is offered during the summer to those already in college, entering college that fall, or entering the senior year of high school. Students are tested at the beginning and the end, both in reading and in study skills, and daily exercises inside and outside class help to make the learning experience immediately meaningful. The students become aware particularly of the advantage of doing the kinds of work they will soon be doing in college for credit. They can take quizzes, write examinations, or plan papers, have them graded, with comments attached, and yet their grades are not held against them — a kind of dry run, you might say. The sharing of problems, ideas, and gimmicks among students on these diverse academic levels has proved most rewarding.

What can parents do to help their sons or daughters adjust to the new experience? They should realize that the first year of college makes severe demands on even the best of students. Suppose, for instance, that the student takes five threesemester-hour courses, totaling fifteen hours a week, and that he follows conscientiously the rule of thumb about two hours of work outside of class for each one spent in class — and many courses demand considerably more than that; at this point he is working a forty-five-hour week. It one of his courses is a four-credit laboratory science, he probably puts in a full afternoon for the extra credit. Add to this the customary two hours of physical education, another full afternoon for an extra lab if he is a premedical or predental student, required time at chapel and assembly or other more or less obligatory nonacademic assignments, language laboratories, and conferences with counselors, instructors, or administrators, and he is pushing close to a sixty-hour week. Then the student has to eat, often standing in line for his food, cafeteria style, or waiting to be served at table. How many letters to home would the average parent write on a schedule like that?

Often without realizing it, parents are imposing psychological burdens on their children by their own attitudes toward college. They didn’t attend, for instance, or they want Junior to profit from their error or misfortune; he now has the opportunity they missed or passed up, and he should not be permitted to forget it. Or else they went to college, did well, and can tolerate no less from their offspring. Or another child, now through college and safely ensconced in his field, is held as an example. Attitudes like these are harmful to the entering student. Parents should see each of their youngsters as a wholly distinct individual with talents and limitations of his own.

The real significance of the college experience rests on self-development, and without honest progress there, grades are an unfair measurement of achievement; with such progress, grades tend to take care of themselves. No amount of parental understanding, high school guidance, or college assistance can take the place of the student’s own courage, insight, and responsiveness. Courage will permit him to venture outside himsell, do the kind of exploring for which higher education was intended. It will inspire him to take the necessary chances without which neither the college experience nor the life experience can be fruitful.

Socrates maintained that the complacently secure life, the life lived without chance, without courage, the “unexamined life,” was not worth living. Examination, especially dispassionate, candid self-examination, requires courage. What are my best points? My worst ones? My personal assets and liabilities? The student will not be able to do everything that is asked of him equally well and must learn from the beginning to sacrifice the lesser for the greater good. But he need not despair nor blame others for his hardships.

From courage grows insight, that capacity for reading into oneself and others beyond the merely showy, illusory surfaces. Mark Van Doren sees higher education as a means of leading one to “know the difference between himself as individual and as person.” Only thus can he be led from the egocentric question, “What do I think?”, to the broadly irradiating one, “What can be thought?” Only thus can he be led to place the emphasis “not upon his reason but upon reason; not upon himself but on his kind.”

Such insight as this cannot be wholly selfgenerated. It derives in college from the healthy interaction of books, ideas, and people. The business of college is knowledge. President Griswold of Yale put it this way:

To do good we must first know good; to serve beauty we must first know beauty; to speak the truth we must first know the truth. We must know these things ourselves, be able to recognize them by ourselves, be able to describe, explain, and communicate them by ourselves, and wish to do so, when no one else is present to prompt us or bargain with us. Such knowledge is the purpose of a liberal education.

Such superb detachment as this can be realized only lay the student prepared to respond vigorously, enthusiastically, even joyously to the opportunities in the first year of college. He should make full use of all the personnel and resources available to him: counselors, library, teachers, books, friendships. He should be willing to give of himself in time, patience, industry, and energy. For crowded hours he will be paid in secure and unswerving knowledge; for diverse minor problems he will be rewarded with unified breadth of conception; and for occasional loneliness and distress, he will reap a lifetime of anticipation. “The educated man,” says Van Doren, “is neither scared by novelty nor bored with it.”