IVING ON CAMPUS HAS BECOME A DEFINING feature of American higher education. For the past century, many colleges have experienced year-after-year increases in their numbers of on-campus residents, a trend that has accelerated over the past 30 years. Despite record residence hall populations, life for students on campus in most colleges and universities has remained unchanged for decades. As Caitlin Peterkin explains in a 2013 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, schools across the country have made enormous investments in developing new and creative means for housing students. Despite these attempts, most students still are assigned to living spaces in traditional dormitories, still must unite their own academic and living experiences, and still are expected to mature as a natural reaction to the rigors of academia.Correspondingly, most large colleges and universities have struggled to address the needs of traditional students who have been thrust into a new and challenging situation with the recent independence and curiosity that comes with young adulthood. In our experience, institutional responses to these challenges are often segmented, fragmented, and compartmentalized. For instance, when instructors notice struggling students, individual departments usually respond with tutoring; problems with alcohol consumption typically are addressed through the counseling and student conduct offi ces; and social activities are handled by student aff airs areas such as residence life. The result is a patchwork of Band-Aids that include underreactions, overreactions, and solutions to problems that may never have existed in the fi rst place.As one of the largest universities in the country, Michigan State University epitomizes the rapid growth of on-campus college life that has come to defi ne the American higher education experience. With more than 36,000 undergraduate students, our residence hall system is one of the largest in the country, and our sprawling campus means students can travel miles for access to resources and services. For some of our students, our residential colleges provide an integrated academic life experience. Most of our students, however, live in large residence halls.One of the most frustrating challenges we face at Michigan State is our high rate of fi rst-year students on probation after a semester. For an incoming class of approximately 7,500 students, around 750 of them are on probation as they transition from the fall to spring semesters. We are acutely aware that students on probation are less likely to succeed in subsequent
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