Joe Cuseo - Research indicates that at least one-half of all students who drop out of college will do so during their freshman year (Consortium for Student Retention Data Exchange, 1999). According to Lee Noel (1985), “The critical time in establishing the kind of one-to-one contacts between students and their teachers and advisers that contribute to student success and satisfaction occur during the first few weeks of the freshman year” (p. 20). Support for this observation is provided by the National Institute of Education’s (1984) landmark report on the quality of undergraduate education in America. Its panel of distinguished scholars’ first recommendation for improving undergraduate education was “front loading”, which they define as the reallocation of faculty and other institutional resources to better serve entering students.

John Gardner suggests that front-loaded support for first-year students during their early weeks on campus works like the marketing concept of “second sale,” whereby the college helps students overcome “buyers remorse” and make a long-term commitment to remain at the institution (Gardner, 1986, p. 267). High-quality advising during the first-semester of college may be one way to promote long-term student commitment and retention. The importance of quality first-year advisement for the retention of African-American students, in particular, is empirically supported by research indicating that the frequency of personal contacts between black freshmen and their academic advisors is the variable that is most strongly associated with retention through the critical freshman year; furthermore, the frequency of student-advisor contact is significantly higher if the first contact occurs early in the freshman year (Trippi & Gheatham, 1989).