College Transition Program Study Stresses Importance of Validation

Dr. Adrianna Kezar, Dean’s Professor of Leadership and Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education at the University of Southern CaliforniaDr. Dusten Crichton remembers sitting down as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas with the director of financial aid to fill out a paper copy of the FAFSA. Crichton grew up as an orphan and a ward of the court. Simply figuring out in that office that he could leave blank the form's line that asked for his parents’ income made a difference.

“From then on, every time I had to do the FAFSA, it was the same thing,” said Crichton about meeting with the director. “He would sit down with me and make sure that I did the paperwork right to get the maximum aid that I could. If you were to talk to the people at TLC, you would find that they also had people like that.”

Today, Crichton directs the Thompson Learning Community, or TLC, at the University of Nebraska’s campus in Omaha. The program supports low-income students, many of whom are first-generation students and people of color.

In a six-year longitudinal study, researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) Rossier School of Education looked at the Thompson Scholars Learning Community (TSLC) across the University of Nebraska's three campuses to find out what worked and what didn’t in a comprehensive college transition program (CTP). Crichton's program was one of those studied.

USC’s Pullias Center for Higher Education conducted the research and prepared seven reports on the findings as well as how other institutions could apply the learnings. Researchers defined student success through such measures as academic self-efficacy and a sense of belonging. 

Among the findings were that proactive advising strengthens students’ academic self-efficacy and that supporting students requires tailoring services to students' complex individual needs. In addition, the researchers discovered that being part of a comprehensive college transition program can increase students’ feeling of mattering.

“We found that students in our study succeeded because they were able to create a meaningful and trusting relationship with another human being on campus,” said Dr. Adrianna Kezar, one of the study’s lead authors and the Dean’s Professor of Leadership and Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education at USC. “And that person was able to connect them to a variety of supports to help build their confidence in ways that technology does not. A lot of what we found was more human than data.”