Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    AI and Microcredentials
Sign In
Sophomores' 2nd Chance

The Other Freshman Class

By Beckie Supiano June 24, 2021
One woman, young lady using laptop in home office, studying for exam.
A student prepares for an exam from home. Last year’s freshmen missed out on the normal first-year experience. Getty Images

Wyatt Ashton’s freshman-year experience would sound familiar to many students who started college under the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. He met just one of his professors in person. He didn’t participate in any extracurriculars or join any clubs. He mostly hung out with his three suitemates and four women from a suite in their hall, and figures he socialized with about 15 students, total. The number only grew that high, he says, because one of the women in his core group from the dorm was particularly outgoing.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Wyatt Ashton’s freshman-year experience would sound familiar to many students who started college under the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. He met just one of his professors in person. He didn’t participate in any extracurriculars or join any clubs. He mostly hung out with his three suitemates and four women from a suite in their hall, and figures he socialized with about 15 students, total. The number only grew that high, he says, because one of the women in his core group from the dorm was particularly outgoing.

Ashton, a secondary-education major at Arizona State University, maintained a perfect grade-point average. But he withdrew from a math class he feared he’d otherwise have failed. Meanwhile, he found his other courses unchallenging. Often, Ashton says, “teachers didn’t know how to adjust their lesson plans away from lectures.” And, he adds, “lectures over Zoom were just insanely boring.”

Freshman year is about figuring out who and what you like. Ideally, students interact with at least one instructor outside of class, and move from making acquaintances on campus to making friends. They begin pinpointing their interests, academically and otherwise, and figuring out how to pursue them. To facilitate this, colleges offer first-year students an abundance of people to meet and new things to try — and push them to take advantage of that at every turn.

This year’s rising sophomores — even those like Ashton who technically spent a year living and learning on campus — didn’t have access to the full abundance. And they didn’t get that push. As a result, come fall colleges will in many ways have two cohorts of first-year students.

Sophomores don’t want to be treated like freshmen. But they are eager to make up for lost time socially. “The No. 1 thing they want is to be able to get to know their fellow students,” says Paula Patch, assistant director for first-year initiatives in the core curriculum at Elon University. “They want to expand their friend group.” That means interacting with classmates in a more normal way, she says. It means gathering in larger groups without university supervision, too.

In their first year of college, rising sophomores know, many professors extended academic grace, so students haven’t had courses at their full intensity yet. At the same time, many have seen their study habits crumble, adding to the fear that they’re behind. Professors will have to act like trainers or coaches getting them back into condition, says Patch, who is also a senior lecturer in English. “We need to develop stamina,” she says, “not assume it’s there.”

Rising sophomores transitioned into college with a lot less in-person support than they’d normally receive, on both the high-school and college sides, says Aaron Thompson, president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education. That made the adjustment harder for everyone, he says, but especially for first-generation students.

That’s why the council included efforts to support rising sophomores when it awarded $1.5 million in competitive grants to support summer “bridge” programs at the state’s colleges this year. “It’s not whether or not they can handle a college course,” Thompson says. “It’s whether or not they can handle college.”

Even though it’s not yet clear how much the pandemic affected learning, it doesn’t make sense to wait to offer help, Thompson says. Colleges already know what kinds of efforts improve retention. “You get nothing but return on investment,” in this kind of support, says Thompson, who had long wanted to raise funding for bridge programs. In the unlikely event that learning was unaffected, the state’s extra support will have accelerated learning, he says, “and that’s not bad.”

‘We Can’t Pretend That Everything Is Fine’

Kevin Gooding wears two hats at West Virginia University’s Honors College, directing its living-learning community and teaching as a service assistant professor. In both roles, his focus is on helping students build the relationships he knows are crucial to their success.

Last year, Covid-safety precautions precluded many of Gooding’s go-to moves, like taking students on field trips and spending time in the dorms. Gooding continued to teach in person, and shifted the rest of his work online as well as he could. But it wasn’t the same, he says. “We all just got so sick of Zoom.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Something that mattered was missing, Gooding says. “We can’t just kind of pretend, for our second-years, that everything is fine, that they had anything approaching a normal year.”

Advancing from freshman to sophomore year is “perhaps as hard as the transition from home to college,” Gooding says. At West Virginia, sophomores usually move off campus, which introduces a host of new responsibilities — and reduces their contact time with university staff.

If the second year of college is known for anything, it’s the sophomore slump. A growing number of colleges have established programs meant to make sophomore year distinctive in a good way, perhaps by students’ working closely with a mentor or embarking on a research project. Even where such support already exists, this group of sophomores may have an unusual set of needs.

Gooding knows the first-year students he worked with last year will require extra help getting plugged in, and is talking with colleagues across the Honors College to figure out how best to provide that. He knows he wants to take this year’s sophomores on the sort of field trip they’d normally have had as freshmen. It’s an academically minded excursion — Gooding includes a professor with expertise relevant to whatever site they visit. Even so, Gooding says, for many students the most meaningful part of the trip is the conversations they have with one another on the bus ride home.

Getting Back on Track

Everyone worried about what remote instruction would mean for students’ academic performance. When officials at Georgia State University looked at students’ grades during the pandemic, the distribution was pretty similar to previous semesters. But that’s in the aggregate. The picture looked quite different when grades were broken down by class year, says Tim Renick, executive director of the university’s National Institute for Student Success. Juniors and seniors did a bit better than usual. But among freshmen, there was a significant increase in the numbers of courses in which students got a D, failed, or withdrew.

ADVERTISEMENT

It makes sense, once you think about it. Upperclassmen have figured out how to be successful college students. They’re likely to be taking courses they are interested or invested in. Rising sophomores, in contrast, had no previous college experience and were more likely to be in large, introductory courses whose importance might have been unclear to them.

In response, Georgia State is running an accelerator program this summer to help rising sophomores get back on track. The university has identified a set of core prerequisite courses and recruited instructors who excel in teaching freshmen to run them, with support from student peer mentors. Georgia State is using stimulus money to cover students’ tuition, so that the program won’t put a dent in their financial aid. Courses are being offered in person and online, and 750 rising sophomores are participating.

University leaders are thinking about students’ lives beyond the classroom, too. Last year, Renick says, students who lived on campus might have been in a suite alone, where normally they’d have had three suitemates. Many clubs have not been able to operate normally.

“So how do we recover all of that?” Renick asks. “It’s not going to be a one-time thing.” One approach Georgia State is trying: Applying its analytics to student affairs, using a platform to ask students about their interests and connect them to extracurriculars that could be a good match.

ADVERTISEMENT

Ashton, the Arizona State student, knows he could have gotten more involved on campus, but the idea of going to a Zoom clubs fair was unappealing. He would have been more likely to join something, he figures, if he’d seen fliers around campus, or heard other students talking about their own involvement.

Academically minded and introverted, Ashton says that a year ago he’d never have imagined joining a fraternity. Now he’s planning on it. “I hadn’t considered the social need for myself to be that great until last semester,” he says. Even if he doesn’t participate in everything the fraternity does, Ashton figures, it will give him connections: to other students, and to other activities like intramural sports. Those connections, he’s learned the hard way, are the heart of the college experience.

A version of this article appeared in the July 9, 2021, issue.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Innovation & Transformation First-Generation Students
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
Supiano_Beckie.jpg
About the Author
Beckie Supiano
Beckie Supiano is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, where she covers teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. She is also a co-author of The Chronicle’s free, weekly Teaching newsletter that focuses on what works in and around the classroom. Email her at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Photo illustration showing Santa Ono seated, places small in the corner of a dark space
'Unrelentingly Sad'
Santa Ono Wanted a Presidency. He Became a Pariah.
Illustration of a rushing crowd carrying HSI letters
Seeking precedent
Funding for Hispanic-Serving Institutions Is Discriminatory and Unconstitutional, Lawsuit Argues
Photo-based illustration of scissors cutting through paper that is a photo of an idyllic liberal arts college campus on one side and money on the other
Finance
Small Colleges Are Banding Together Against a Higher Endowment Tax. This Is Why.
Pano Kanelos, founding president of the U. of Austin.
Q&A
One Year In, What Has ‘the Anti-Harvard’ University Accomplished?

From The Review

Photo- and type-based illustration depicting the acronym AAUP with the second A as the arrow of a compass and facing not north but southeast.
The Review | Essay
The Unraveling of the AAUP
By Matthew W. Finkin
Photo-based illustration of the Capitol building dome propped on a stick attached to a string, like a trap.
The Review | Opinion
Colleges Can’t Trust the Federal Government. What Now?
By Brian Rosenberg
Illustration of an unequal sign in black on a white background
The Review | Essay
What Is Replacing DEI? Racism.
By Richard Amesbury

Upcoming Events

Plain_Acuity_DurableSkills_VF.png
Why Employers Value ‘Durable’ Skills
Warwick_Leadership_Javi.png
University Transformation: a Global Leadership Perspective
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin