ABSTRACT
This is not the chapter I expected to write. I wanted to write about how linked classes for first-year students at my university produce higher retention rates from the freshman to the sophomore year. Of course, I knew I wouldn’t be the first to make such as argument. Vincent Tinto’s article, “Building Community” (1993), describes a longitudinal study of first-year learning communities (FLCs) at the University of Washington and Seattle Central Community College. Persistence rates from spring to fall for students enrolled in FLCs were markedly higher than those of students not enrolled. Hotchkiss, Moore, and Pitts’s article, “Freshman Learning Communities, College Performance, and Retention” (2006), studies similar persistence rates at Georgia State University, though they factored in race and gender to show how FLCs aided retention, especially with Black men and women. Soldner, Lee, and Duby’s article, “Welcome to the Block: Developing Freshman Learning Communities that Work” (1999), studies persistence rates at Northern Michigan University that, in keeping with most other articles about retention and FLCs, show that participation in such a community positively affects retention.
