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Each semester, IUPUI dismisses 500 or more students for academic reasons in their first years of study. Yet the full-time faculty working with students in our first-year student learning communities report that each student has a strength. The challenge, then, is to identify that strength and build on it in a way that promotes student success.
University College stands ready to take that challenge.
Now open for business in the newly renovated former library at IUPUI, University College has been touted to be about many things: enhancing undergraduate retention, making the campus more attractive to potential students and creating a home base for all freshmen.
It is about all of those. But most of all, it is about faculty working together with staff and students to focus on student learning. It is about discovering how faculty, staff and students can support students in their academic endeavors. It is about identifying existing strengths of students and building upon them.
We have already learned much from our first-year student seminars, taught in several schools, and supplemental instruction programs serving 1,000 students each week.
Beginning in fall 1998, University College will serve as the academic home for IUPUI's entering students. We will focus on high expectations, connect students and provide assessment and feedback -- all key ingredients in the recipe for undergraduate success. We will work together to challenge our entering students to increased levels of commitment to study. We will work with other faculty in the development of honors courses and programs for new students, programs that focus on the work and commitment that will be expected of students.
University College will be a place of continuous learning, where those involved have the support to develop, implement and assess new programs. Our "experimenting place" will keep those involved in the project energized about their endeavors, not working in an "automatic pilot" mode but rather being intentional and reflective about our work.
This ambitious project promises success, but it is too soon to say whether our plans will solve the issue of student academic achievement and persistence. Students, faculty and staff face new challenges with the establishment of University College. They bring new assumptions and expectations.
It is not too soon, however, to say that University College is providing students, faculty and staff with an exciting new opportunity to focus on student learning -- together.