From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer

"An inspiring history of how a campus envisioned and executed a truly student-centered course that galvanized the whole campus community to provide students with a holistic, inclusive, and personally validating first-year experience. The practices and principles underlying UNIV 101's well-documented impact should be intentionally incorporated into all first-year seminar models."—Joe Cuseo, Professor Emeritus, Psychology, Marymount California University

"From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer [addresses] not only the history of the University 101 course at the University of South Carolina but also the ingredients that made this remarkable experiment such a success. Anyone associated with first-year seminars will find rich resources within these pages for creating an effective and enduring program based on the principles that the authors have so carefully researched and documented."—Laurie A. Schreiner, Professor of Higher Education, Azusa Pacific University

"[Reading From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer] takes me back to my days as a first-generation student trying tonavigate a foreign land to hopefully a successful destination. It also takes me back to my early days as a professor . . . when I promised myself and my students I would help them to not have such a new immigrant experience. Friedman and his co-contributors do a wonderful job of not only telling the University of South Carolina's ground-breaking history of organizing a holistic course and designing a foundational experience for new students, they also lay out how visionary leaders thought about transforming student learning. . . . We know the role UofSC has played in the first-year movement. [This book] provides a roadmap for those that have not yet joined the movement.""—Aaron Thompson, President of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education

"As a key social movement in higher education, University 101 changed the way colleges and universities welcome new students, resulting in greater academic achievement and higher first-to-second-year persistence rates. From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer commemorates fifty years of the transformative first-year seminar model by recounting its rich history and revealing its masterplan, while looking to the future by encouraging innovation about what is still needed to help new students transition into and through their undergraduate education"—Jillian Kinzie, Interim Co-Director, National Survey of Student Engagement, Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research

"Above all, this monograph makes a compelling case for the efficacy of intentional orientation seminars and first-year programs at institutions of higher education. [. . .] From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer: University 101 at the University of South Carolina is a worthy addition to the literature for scholars of higher education and an exceptional resource for student affairs practitioners and campus administrators."—College and Research Libraries