Understanding the New College Student

What does the new generation of college students look like? What experiences do they bring? What challenges should higher education faculty be prepared to face? Join Rob McDole and Jared Pyles as they introduce this new series.

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View a transcript of this week's episode.

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• FOCUS Blog from the Cedarville University CTL

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What is Transform Your Teaching?

The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.

Jared: 00:01

Hello, Transform Your Teaching listeners. It's Jared. Whether you are new to the podcast or have been around since day one, we want to hear from you. Please take a minute and fill out our quick survey and help us make the podcast even better. Click the link in our description.

Jared: 00:15

We'd be very grateful if you did. And for participating, you'll be put into a drawing for a handcrafted transform your teaching mug. And we're doing a drawing in the month of October, November, and December. So be sure to participate and help us out. We'd be grateful if you did.

Jared: 00:33

And as always, thanks for listening.

Narrator: 00:40

This is the Transform Your Teaching podcast. The Transform Your Teaching Podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.

Jared: 00:53

Welcome back to the Transform Your Teaching Podcast. My name is Jared Pyles, with me is Dr. Rob McDole. It is the new series episode. Usually, start our new series with an intro episode and okay.

Jared: 01:11

Full disclosure. We've spent more time planning this series than any other series that we've had.

Rob: 01:18

Yeah. It's definitely the more we go looking, the more we realize there's more more things to actually investigate, look at, and we've already split this thing into two separate series. Correct. We might have a third depending on what kind of feedback we get from from listeners.

Jared: 01:37

Which which, by the way, send us an email. Please. At CTL podcast at Cedarville dot e d u. But also you can connect with us on LinkedIn.

Rob: 01:46

Yeah. So the title of the series is understanding the new college student. That's where we're at right now. And the reason for this is every year, starting the year here at Cedarville University, we have a faculty and staff day where doctor White, our president, he gets up and he kinda gives us a lay of the land of what he's been looking at during the summer, you know, what he's going to do in terms of chapel series and and all all those things. It was very interesting when he started talking about enrollment trends and student trends.

Rob: 02:24

And he used some language, and we're gonna talk about that here in a minute. But that's really got us thinking. We were already thinking about this based on some interactions we'd had with some faculty. And, you know, it was like, how do we have conversations around student success? How can we help remove barriers or even identify barriers to student success?

Jared: 02:44

Right. Yeah. Our our purpose really is, like you said, to put it frankly, college enrollment is down.

Rob: 02:52

Yes. Across the nation because we have Across

Jared: 02:54

the nation.

Rob: 02:55

Because we have a decrease in population.

Jared: 02:58

Correct. Yes. So it's down, and there's other factors like dual credit being one of those Right. That's affecting the landscape of higher education in terms of students. So you've got students that are already have already taken college courses Yes.

Jared: 03:14

Before they come into a traditional college campus. COVID nineteen.

Rob: 03:20

Yeah. We're starting to really feel the effects of students who, you know, were middle school Yeah. Freshmen, you know, when when that was taking place in 2020.

Jared: 03:32

So the goal of the series really is to we wanna answer the question, what do instructors need to know or do that can inform their daily teaching to continue to serve the needs of their students with all this in mind?

Rob: 03:44

Yep. And we're gonna look at certain factors. Right? We've talked about them off air, but one of those that we haven't really dug into a good bit is, like, backgrounds. Yeah.

Rob: 03:58

Where are they coming from? Are they coming from, you know, rural area? Are they coming from an urban area? What kind of teaching or or learning have they been accustomed to? So we here at Cedarville, we have folks from STEM academies.

Rob: 04:15

We have folks from normal public school, you know, your normal public schools in the area. Have Christian Christian schools, and and we have homeschoolers. Mhmm. And then we have, you know, homeschoolers who are part of, like, some of these larger groups that have coalesced over the past ten, fifteen years, like classical conversations. So, you know, in classical conversations groups now, they have their own accrediting kind of like body or organization that they've just started up within the past five years.

Rob: 04:51

So these are where our students are coming from. Right. You know, what's that look like?

Jared: 04:56

And those all affect student performance too. Like, for example, I grew up in a rural district. Yes. You know, way back. Gallipolis.

Jared: 05:05

Gallipolis, Ohio, home of the Gauls, city of the Gauls. And, I we had I mean, at that time, it was what? Oh my gosh. Twenty years ago, I graduated from Cedarville, so almost '25. Mhmm.

Jared: 05:20

I graduated high school. Dial up Internet. You know? Then then I come here on campus and high speed Internet. Mhmm.

Jared: 05:29

I can actually, like, surf the Internet without having problems. But then I'd go home, and I would lose access to that high speed. So I took online bio when I was here and everything was fine here on campus. When I got home, none of the videos would load and I had a lot of issues because the digital access that I enjoyed while on campus went away. And so I'm like, well, how am I supposed to do all this work if I can't even connect?

Jared: 05:57

And my mom's gotta be on the phone, so I gotta disconnect the dial up and do Obviously, there's no more dial up in although I would argue that sometimes dial up would be better than the current situation they have down in Galapalese, Ohio.

Rob: 06:10

Now you have mobile. Yeah. Wi Fi, mobile cellular towers, and those kinds of things. And But even then still bad. It's really bad.

Rob: 06:19

Especially in the areas where it's mountainous, like Yellow Police Yeah. West Virginia, parts of Virginia, anywhere where you have mountain ranges really hilly, it's gonna be difficult if people live out there in those valleys or or up, as they say, you know, in a holler. In the hollers? Yeah. So not having connection is a big issue.

Jared: 06:42

Yeah. And that's just one example of the access they may not have

Rob: 06:45

to Well, it has a knock on effect when they come to they come to here. They come to Cedarville. Right? And and they're not competing, but they're they're taking classes alongside peers who've had more access if they've especially if they've come, like, say, from Columbus. Right.

Rob: 07:03

Where Columbus has lots of homes that have fiber to their home. Correct. We're not just talking about, you know, high speed Internet. We're talking about run run servers from your house kind of

Jared: 07:15

Correct.

Rob: 07:16

Speeds. So I don't want people to think we're sitting here going, oh, that's such an inequality. But the reality is it does have an effect on what you're able to do Yeah. With, you know, the things that you have available to you.

Jared: 07:32

And you talk about resources by the type of district that a student comes from. Correct. Rural, urban, suburban. I mean, we'll go through the different data that shows that certain districts are higher performing simply because of the schools that they're in and the tax bracket and all the people that live in that area are able to pay for and stuff like that. Like you said, we'll talk about type of schooling, we'll talk about international students.

Jared: 07:58

That's a whole that's a huge thing as well here on campus. And one of the bigger topics that I'm glad we're talking about is mental health.

Rob: 08:05

Yeah. That's a big one. You can't avoid it. Mhmm. It's all over the news.

Rob: 08:11

It's it's in the literature. It's pretty clear that it's a problem, and it kinda goes along with that math shark thing too.

Jared: 08:19

Yeah.

Rob: 08:20

So it'd be interesting. We wanna bring people in

Jared: 08:22

Mhmm.

Rob: 08:23

Who are knowledgeable in these areas because Jared and I are not we don't have the answers to all these things. So we are we're inquiring, and we hope that you'll join us as we go down some of these paths because, ultimately, we wanna learn, and we wanna do better for our students. We wanna be able to support our faculty better in this as well. And so, yeah, I think some of these factors I I wanna answer questions like, you know, what does the rising college student look like? Yeah.

Rob: 08:57

Again, where are they coming from? What kind of habits are they gonna have? It seems like everybody's just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. The first thing they do when they get up in the morning is they just start scrolling whatever it is. I don't even know what it is now because I'm not you know that.

Rob: 09:12

I I'm not on

Jared: 09:13

Social media.

Rob: 09:14

Social media. So I it used to be my kids would say something like Instagram, and I don't know if Snapchat is still a thing.

Jared: 09:22

It's still a thing.

Rob: 09:25

TikTok.

Jared: 09:25

TikTok. Yep.

Rob: 09:26

Anyway, those are some of the questions. What about you? You any questions that you want want to have answered?

Jared: 09:32

So I'm always thinking about generational shifts. One of my favorite things that I did when I taught high school is that we talked about the generational shift between, like, the millennials and Gen X and the boomer generation and talking about, like, misperceptions that happen as a result of, you know, well, boomers think that millennials do this, millennials think boomers do this, Gen X thinks this. And so I'm always curious as to when generational shifts occur. Yeah. So I'm wondering because that has an effect on students and the student instructor relationship because the instructor thinks students think or learn a different way than they actually learn because it's like, well, last year's students did this and the seniors that I have learned this way, the freshmen should learn it the same way, they're only four years apart.

Jared: 10:25

But in reality, there could be a gap there, a shift in generation. I like to talk to someone who would do that because, I mean, the main purpose of doing all this is for us to, like we always talked about from the very beginning, to be a model of servant teaching. Because we want to help serve the needs of students, you know, whatever it is. It could be based on where they come from and their background and their mental health or SES or whatever factors that play into that. They're in your classroom.

Jared: 10:56

We're not saying pry into their lines and be like, how much money do your parents make? You know, or things like that. You don't have to go that heavy into it. What kind of car do they drive? You know, don't do that.

Jared: 11:05

But reality is they're sitting to your classroom. You need to know about where they come from so you can help serve their needs best. Right? I mean, that's really the purpose of us as educators is to serve the needs of our students. And I think that's an important part to play as well.

Jared: 11:21

But yeah, generational shift, where are they coming from, what are they going home to, I think is interesting as well. Think about assigning that homework over break, but if your student doesn't have access to the things that you assume they have access to, it could be an issue there. You know, stuff like that. Because I think COVID exposed that a lot because, you know, think about if I were if this would've happened back in, if the COVID would've happened back in 02/2001, '2 thousand and '2 when I was a student here, I would try to go home and work on the coursework that was online that I could've easily accessed on campus, but at home in my 56 K, 20 8 sometimes dial up, I I would have been stuck. And I think COVID was a good example of how that disparity of access comes into play.

Rob: 12:11

Yeah. I think it was more than that. I think it was a COVID really pulled the rug out from underneath systems that people had just kind of grown accustomed to. And, obviously, I'm a proponent of online.

Jared: 12:29

But Me too. Big fan.

Rob: 12:31

But I also know that relationships are the most important thing. It's never been an issue for me where I felt like online should take over everything because I just don't believe

Jared: 12:42

that.

Rob: 12:43

Sure. I just think the face to face should be golden. It's like the golden hour. And so it's just a matter of of us figuring out how can we make the best. How can we bring the most out of these face to face experiences that we do have.

Rob: 13:02

And then how can we approximate that for those who who don't have an opportunity?

Jared: 13:07

Right.

Rob: 13:08

Right? Who can't make it here for whatever reason.

Jared: 13:10

Mhmm.

Rob: 13:11

And I think it ultimately kind of going along with what you were saying as we look at these things, I I think about Cedarville's, you know, mission and vision. And and our our mission is to transform lives through, you know, excellent education and intentional discipleship and submission to biblical authority. And we want to do that. And how do we do that with this upcoming group of students that are coming? We have to know who they are.

Rob: 13:43

Yeah. Right? If we truly are gonna fulfill not only our mission but our vision, which is, you know, for the word of God and testimony of Jesus Christ, we have to be, I think, more like Jesus in those issues where we can identify with, we understand those that we're we're seeking to minister to and to educate. This is the kickoff, if I can say it that way. Sure.

Rob: 14:10

This is the start of us going deeper into servant teaching and just asking those questions, just just pushing further in. That's something that doctor White's really pushed us as an organization. Yeah. We're doing well, but can we do better? Right.

Rob: 14:25

And I think this is one of those things, again, that I think we can. But we don't know what we don't know. Sure. So I'm looking forward to it.

Jared: 14:34

Yeah. And then so the the plan is for us to do this series on understanding the new college student, which will then lead into our next series, which is going to be tearing down barriers. We haven't got the title totally nailed down yet, but tearing down barriers for the new college student. So once we set this, it's like knowing your student's background before they come into your classroom. What do they already know?

Jared: 14:58

Where are they coming from? As far as in the program or whatever, now we're looking at it taking a bigger snapshot of that and then applying it to our next series on that. But in this series, we're going to talk about the different school, traditional schools. In a future episode, we're going to create a student profile of what the type of college student that's upcoming, as well as creating profiles of the districts they're coming from. And our full disclosure again, our scope is pretty much of Ohio when we talk about the districts and everything else.

Jared: 15:27

But when we talk about that, maybe we'll look at national stuff as well, I guess, for

Rob: 15:32

sure. I think should. We just we've gotta find the right people to talk to. So if our listeners know of folks that this is their area Yeah. Please let us know.

Rob: 15:42

We wanna talk to them.

Jared: 15:43

CTL podcast at cedarville dot e d u. Yes. Also connect with us on LinkedIn. Send us a message. Please, please.

Jared: 15:49

Someone will respond to you promptly, I'm sure. Also wanna talk to the students too, which I'm super excited about. That's a good It's perspectives.

Rob: 15:58

Finding out where they're at.

Jared: 15:59

Yeah. So that could reveal some really interesting things as well. So that's gonna be our series, our next series coming up. I'm excited. Me too.

Jared: 16:08

That's gonna do it for us on the Transformer Teaching Podcast. Be sure to like and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Connect with us on LinkedIn. We have a link in our show notes to help you with that. And send us an email at CTL CTLPodcastcedarville dot edu.

Jared: 16:25

You can also check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog. Thanks for listening.