The Power of Personal Coaching: Helping First-Year Students to Connect and Commit in College

Abstract

Colleges and universities have long recognized that helping students to become personally connected and committed early in college is critical to their successful retention and graduation. Getting connected to the institution and committed to the academic process are especially challenging for new students who must quickly master a wide range of academic, personal, and social adjustments. For these reasons, institutions typically frontload a wide variety of services and personnel designed to help new students survive in college such as first-year courses, first-year interest groups, living-learning communities, help centers, advisers, counselors, tutors, and mentors. Recently a new kind of new student support service, personal coaching, is proving in some situations to be more effective than traditional new student services in increasing students’ abilities to connect and commit in college. The authors examine the role of personal coaching in college, reasons it appears to be a powerful intervention in encouraging student academic success, and the challenges it presents for traditional institutional approaches to encouraging new student engagement and persistence.