Abstract
The college experience can be a critically important and enriching time for personal as well as academic growth and development. For many students, college is their first foray into a more independent world and lifestyle no longer under the careful, and sometimes critical, eyes of their parents, families, and schoolteachers. When students go far away from home to attend college, they need to find ways to live independently, manage their many needs, and attend to the rigors of academic life in higher education. Additionally, the college years offer a unique and important period for spiritual growth, development, and transformation. The purpose of this article is to highlight some of the developmental tasks and challenges of the college years and provide examples of how colleges can be intentional and strategic about spiritual growth and development by focusing on strategies offered by Jesuit higher education.
Highlights
The college experience can be a critically important and enriching time for personal as well as academic growth and development
Most college students live at home and not on a college campus, and attend local community colleges or nearby public universities as commuting students, frequently working full or part time jobs while doing so (Levine and Dean 2012)
Identity refers to questions of “Who am I and who do I want to be?” Developing one’s own unique identity while becoming separate from family, community, and other childhood influences, college student forge an emerging personal identity during the college years
Summary
Identity refers to questions of “Who am I and who do I want to be?” Developing one’s own unique identity while becoming separate from family, community, and other childhood influences, college student forge an emerging personal identity during the college years. Managing impulses while being surrounded by peers, including roommates, who may engage in destructive and irresponsible behaviors, experience significant impulse control challenges, find themselves getting into significant trouble by failing classes, harm themselves or others, drink to excess regularly, and so forth make these developmental tasks that much harder to negotiate In their efforts to develop skills with the four I’s, student can too often do the “wrong thing for the right reason” (Plante and Plante 2017). Faith-based educational institutions generally take the spiritual development of their students, as well as their faculty and staff, seriously by offering a variety of strategic and intentional programs and opportunities to nurture spiritual development and transformation for all segments of the campus community, but most especially for their college students. Being thoughtful and mindful of adolescent and young adult development would serve them well in regards to their program development
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