Abstract:

College student retention is an important issue for colleges and universities across the United States. Most retention-based initiatives are related to advising, mentoring, first-year experience-programs, and new student orientation. The University of Kentucky has recently taken an aggressive approach to combating retention and increasing the potential for first-year student success. This study contributes to this movement and is rooted in cross-cultural adaptation theory (Kim 1988, 2001).

Individuals transitioning from high school to college experience a barrage of challenges as they adapt to college life and navigate their first-year. Therefore, this experience may be conceptualized as a period of cross-cultural adaptation. Stories were collected from 264 first-year college students at three key time periods during their first semester at the University of Kentucky to examine this adaptation experience. Data was analyzed to capture students’ stories about UK and about home over the course of their first semester, how these stories evolved over time, and how non-returning students their first-semester experiences.

Students wrote about negative school experience most often and demonstrated varying degrees of acculturation and deculturation during their adaptation. An alarming percentage of non-returners were females. Implications and future direction are also presented.

Keywords:

First-Year College Students, Cross-Cultural Adaptation, College Student Retention, The Narrative Paradigm.