Freshmen to get more attention

NCCU change to increase support

DURHAM -- N.C. Central University is giving its university college a makeover, the institution's latest attempt to boost retention and graduation rates.

Until now, the university college has been an umbrella for a number of extension services, including summer school, distance education, continuing education and evening and weekend programs.

Starting Tuesday, those functions are being shifted to a new unit, and the university college and much of its staff will be expanded and refocused to target freshman and sophomore students.

The idea is to put a group of services that has been strewn across campus into one division, give them more resources and focus solely on getting young students onto the right academic track.

The shift, called "re-purposing" in higher education parlance, will cost about $1.6 million in new money for personnel and equipment. The university wants to hire 46 new staff members, from administrators to reading and assessment specialists to tutors and academic advisers. The program also expects to lean heavily on 150 volunteers -- older students, alumni, professors and members of the community who can act as mentors to young students.

It is all an effort to ease the transition to college.

"Many students, even if they were top students in high school, have had a close dependency on their parents," said Bernice Johnson, an assistant vice chancellor who will become the new college's dean in July. "It's a real transition and a rude awakening to have all the freedom and responsibility."

The new college's services will include student support -- advising, orientation, career exploration, mentoring, social etiquette and leadership, engagement and community service.

"Most of these things went on in some fashion, to some degree," Johnson said. "The difference now is that every last freshman will receive all of this. They will get all the same quality and consistency."

Many students leave

For a few years, NCCU officials have placed heavier emphasis on improving retention and graduation rates, a goal now targeted as well by UNC system leaders. Currently, 49 percent of NCCU students graduate within six years of beginning college. The UNC system average is 59 percent.

Many of the students who don't make it are lost between the freshman and sophomore years. For example, about 27 percent of NCCU freshmen in the fall of 2005 didn't return for their second year. That number improved some the following year, when just less than 23 percent left school after one year.

The new college's focus on those first two years will be costly but necessary, Chancellor Charlie Nelms said recently.

"You can't talk student persistence and graduation into existence," he said at a recent meeting of campus trustees. "You have to plan it, and you have to invest in it."

The program will begin this fall and will focus on the university's 1,250 new freshmen and 400 new transfers.