• “Personal relationships are really fundamental to college success,” Dan Chambliss, co-author of How College Works, told Next.
• For the book, Chambliss and his co-author, Christopher Takacs, followed nearly 100 students at Hamilton College—where Chambliss recently retired as a sociology professor—to find out which events in their undergraduate career mattered. The book’s central finding: it’s the people, not the programs, that make the difference.
• “What colleges can most effectively do is set up structures that make it very easy for students to get those relationships,” Chambliss said.

Why it matters: Providing an engaging student experience will be critical for colleges to attract and keep students after the pandemic.

• Not only did fewer students start college during the pandemic, but more also dropped out.
• What’s true in business is also true in higher ed: it’s much easier—and often cheaper—to retain an existing student than it is to acquire a new one.
• Colleges sell students on the experience. But during the pandemic it has been difficult for campuses to differentiate their brand from another college’s when many students are at home or in their dorm room learning online or campus life is severely curtailed.
• Enriching the student experience is even more important coming out of the pandemic given three pressures bearing down on higher ed: fewer high-school graduates in the pipeline, shifting demographics overall, and students and parents questioning the value on their investment in a degree.

Background: The structures colleges historically created in the name of student engagement— assigning mentors, freshman seminars, and living-and-learning communities—are sometimes forced, and thus don’t work, Chambliss said.

• “Assigning students a mentor works about as well as assigning you a boyfriend,” he said. “That’s not how it works.”
• Similar issues exist with freshman seminars, which are small classes designed to help students meet classmates and get to know a professor. The problem, Chambliss said, is that there aren’t enough professors who can teach top-notch intro classes “and students tend not to make friends in classes.”

Yes, but: Cohorts still matter to college success. Small groups with overlapping interests make a big campus feel smaller for students. 

—One of the best example of cohorts that work in college are athletic teams.

• Studies have found that college athletes in Division III, the largest of the NCAA divisions, perform better academically when they are in-season than when they’re not.
• “It’s because they’ve got a structure, they’ve got clear expectations, they’ve got people, mainly coaches who are keeping an eye on things, making sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to do,” Chambliss said 

—Colleges have tried to replicate the athletic team model elsewhere with mixed success.

• The University of Dayton, for instance, offers cohorts of 30-40 students a 12-credit certificate in applied creativity through a program that is designed to enable what is called “self-authorship,” or the capacity to define one’s beliefs, identity, and social relations.
• “We’re getting so many students who come back and say, ‘I wasn’t totally sure what I was getting into when I was in this program. I just knew that every week I felt really seen and a sense of belonging in class,’” said Brian LaDuca, executive director of Dayton’s Institute of Applied Creativity for Transformation.
• Dennison University has made mentorship a central part of its undergraduate experience, in part through “advising circles,” which are one-credit classes that help in the transition to college and introduce students to a professor early on.
• Pomona College has developed a series of “Academic Cohorts” in different disciplines for first-generation and low-income students, which the college credits to higher persistence rates for underrepresented minority students in STEM.

The bottom line: Faculty are critical to students finding a sense of belonging and purpose in college.

• But at many institutions the first faculty members that students come in contact with are often part-time, contingent instructors “in charge of large introductory courses that are extremely challenging to teach,” writes the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Beth McMurtrie in an article this week about why faculty often ignore the research on how to improve their teaching.
• Improving the student experience after the pandemic means rethinking the faculty model and incentives for research and service at many universities—a third-rail in the world of academic politics that most college presidents (already beset with a list of challenges) don’t want to touch.
• It also means reconceiving spaces on campus where students gather or can more easily meet faculty and advisors. “Literally, just go around the campus and see the places that really work,” Chambliss said, “and build on that or expand it, or at least be sure nobody kills them off.”