Improve Your University’s Orientation Program
Rethink your college orientation curriculum
Planning and executing a successful university orientation is never a simple task; it’s coordinating experienced and novice staff with students who’re potentially away from home for the first time. It’s building a support network while establishing rules and finding a way to provide resources without preaching too many specific values to a diverse audience. What are the best strategies for ensuring that your campus orientation is attended and enjoyed? And, how can you measure that students received valuable information? From streamlining your intake with a digital form to planning a week-long orientation, you can ensure your attendees walk away fully prepared for their upcoming collegiate careers.
Why Are You Hosting an Orientation?
To make sure your event provides valuable information, you should start by asking yourself why your facility is hosting an orientation at all. If your answer is just to compete with other universities, you may want to consider what benefits you can provide to incoming students. Considering that first-time, first-year undergraduate students already face a dropout rate of 24.1% after one year, orientation is a critical time to help students find their way. Whether that’s meeting more people with similar interests, finding potential mentors and guides, or just getting a thorough tour of the campus, a little extra time in orientation can go a long way.
If you’re starting your orientation curriculum from scratch, getting feedback from existing students or the most recent graduating class can provide valuable insight. Ask them what would have helped them feel most at home on campus, they may yield suggestions you’ve never considered. Additionally, other academic groups, such as National Honor’s Societies or nationwide Greek-letter organizations, may have suggestions and resources too. When it comes to helping your students succeed and thrive in their college experiences, there’s no stone you should leave unturned.
Measure Your Success
Once you know the why behind your orientation, it’s much easier to start tracking whether it’s successful or not. Start by identifying what will signal a successful orientation to you and your staff. For many schools, the primary goals of orientations are to promote an atmosphere of safety and security at the school, to improve student return rates for a second year, and to ease the transition of the semester for the students. In many cases, this will be your students’ first extended time away from home, and that transition can be mentally taxing.
If safety is a priority at your school, make sure it’s a key part of the curriculum. This should include detailed campus tours that call out how to find safety resources, including emergency campus phones or security offices. Actively call out the safety policies at the schools and your staff’s stance on violence or property damages. Keep in mind, if you run a co-ed institution, that a recent Chegg study found women are nearly twice as concerned as men when it comes to campus safety and physical violence. If women make up half your enrollment numbers, safety policies shouldn’t be casually brushed over just because the topic can be difficult to address in large settings.
“43% of female students don’t believe that their school is doing enough to prevent physical assaults, while nearly 7 in 10 male students do.”
On the other hand, if your biggest measure of success will be to counter the freshman dropout rate, then you’ll want to look at second-year enrollment numbers. While those numbers will take longer to measure, they’re an important goal for your university to consider. There have already been studies on the impact of meaningful orientation systems on long-term enrollment, but it will require you to consider the length of your orientation as well.
How Long Is a Great University Orientation?
There has yet to be a number set in stone on how long a successful orientation program should last, but there are indicators that more time is worth it in the long run. In comparing weekend orientations with week-long orientation programs, the longer orientations tend to lead to a 30% increase in the likelihood of a student enrolling at the same university for their sophomore year. Due to the nature of measuring independent students’ preferences, it’s difficult to nail down the exact reason why, but many experts agree the best orientations provide support to the new students in addition to just information about the campus.
In many cases, this support includes things such as:
Opportunities to meet and join interest groups
Detailed tours of the campus that include finding specialties, like coffee shops, study group rooms, gyms or fitness centers, and recommended recreational activities
Find and meet dorm occupants and a slow introduction to roommates
While much of this can be covered in a weekend, a full week-long orientation provides students with more opportunities to connect with other students and explore the campus on their own. And in the case of a parents-welcome orientation, a week-long experience gives students a chance to learn about the school with their parents but also gives the students more time to stand on their own. As their first move away from home life, easing students away from parental supervision may foster a smoother transition.
“Administration of an orientation program to freshmen was found to show a better, easier adaptation to university life.”
What Should a Week-Long Orientation Include?
The day-to-day details of your specific orientation program should be, most importantly, unique to your college experience. As faculty and staff of a higher education institution, it’s important to not only encourage successful studies, but also to craft well-rounded individuals for the future. Extended orientations have the added benefit of being able to include a day or two devoted entirely to activities unique to your region.
If your school is set near the mountains, encourage a student-led hike or short camping trip. Alternatively, for schools set in a busy metropolitan area, explore the arts, museums, or other major attractions nearby. Your students picked your university for a number of reasons, make sure they explore and get to enjoy the environment, since that may have been a contributing factor in their decision. It can be daunting to coordinate activities like these, but with advancing technology it’s easier than ever to automate these processes. Things like digital sign in sheets can support attendance tracking in real-time, apps like Donut can randomly assign student partners within the Slack messaging system, and even temporary geofencing apps make it easy to know students are where they should be. When in doubt, reach out to extended orientation networks for ideas and collaborative problem-solving to build a customized orientation program.
In addition to learning about the school, campus, and fellow students, college orientation programs should include ways for incoming students to connect early with faculty and staff. Connecting with staff members has been shown to have a positive impact on student retention and success, and can provide the additional support the students lack while being away from home. In many cases, having even a single trusted advisor or mentor at a university can make a huge difference for each student.
Your institution’s orientation program likely won’t follow a specific template from any other university, because it will get to highlight all the wonderful things that make your college stand out. As long as you find ways to educate students on the school itself, ensure them of safety resources, and provide some opportunities for team-building and networking with their new classmates, your orientation is bound to be successful.
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