A Frosh New Start

If you've ever seen a new England boarding school or a Harry Potter film, you can picture the scene in Nashville: an idyllic campus with kindly professors who head the dorms, a dining hall that's a social hub and a living room, interhouse rivalries and organized activities galore. But if you're thinking high school, think just a little bit higher; this is the Commons at Vanderbilt University, a brand-new campus within a campus to house the entire class of 2012, 10 professors and its own Dumbledore-like dean. The school spent $150 million and a decade creating this community, designed to help 1,570 first-years get acclimated to college life. And the Commons is just the most holistic example of something that more and more campuses are prioritizing: the new freshman experience. (See pictures of the college dorm room's evolution.)

The goal is a living-and-learning environment that promotes both school spirit and responsibility to community among an increasingly diverse student body. Tactics include creating residential areas for first-years only, encouraging student-faculty interaction, extending orientation to full-term classes and hiring extra staff who plan activities like ice cream socials and watch out for strugglers.

Although some schools are postponing new projects because of the faltering economy, others are forging ahead with plans to emulate freshman programs that have long existed at some of the nation's oldest colleges. And these schools are investing in neo--Harvard Yards at least in part to compete better for top students and bolster retention rates, both of which factor into the much studied college rankings by U.S. News & World Report. That raises a question: Freshman-year coddling may help allay the anxieties of helicopter parents, but is the college experience--the time when students are supposed to push boundaries, establish their independence and become adults--just turning into High School 2.0?

As higher education adjusts to the needs of 21st century students, schools are trying to borrow from the campus culture of yore, when college kids spent evenings analyzing poetry in professors' quarters. Research indicates that students are more likely to be satisfied with school and become campus leaders if they spend time with faculty. Which is why the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville created Core Connections, which lets mostly freshmen opt to live in two dorms where attendance at faculty-planned events is required. The University of Maine now makes all frosh live together in dorms with new support networks. Ditto for Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where first-years are also encouraged to go on hikes with the profs who lead their freshman seminars and to debate them at town meetings.

See pictures of teens and how they would vote.

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