This may be college, but we're still taking attendance

Even though colleges have spent big on such programs, it's not clear how effective they are. About 71 percent of all accredited undergraduate-degree-granting institutions now offer some kind of freshman-year seminar, says John Gardner, executive director of the Policy Center on the First Year of College at Brevard College in North Carolina.

Still, today's graduation rates are better than in the past and may be due, in part, to such efforts, he and others say.

"In spite of all the breast beating over inadequate retention rates, I think higher education would have been a lot worse off if it hadn't made a lot of the changes they've been making over the last 20 years," he says.

Still, it is up to each institution to change its own structure to accommodate "at-risk" students who typically have less thorough academic preparation or come from families with fewer resources.

Bowling Green State University in Ohio has succeeded in changing its structure. For the past two to three years, it has focused on getting students to declare a major earlier and to meet regularly with advisers. Research, school officials say, shows that if students don't declare a major quickly they may not return to school.

"We are not just waiting for students to come in if they have a question," says Lisa McHugh, director of academic enhancement at the university. "We are asking them [if] they thought about a major in this or that area."

Bowling Green has an additional hurdle. A large minority of students on campus are the first in their families to attend college and are particularly at risk of dropping out. Even so, the school's results are impressive: Instead of the "expected graduation rate" of 46 percent (which is based on the academic profile of the student body), the reality is that 58 percent of the students actually walk across the stage and get a diploma.

That 12 percentage point difference places Bowling Green third among 57 institutions in the "overperformance" category of graduation rates in a recent national ranking. The university also has improved its graduation rate for minority students by about nine percentage points over the past decade.

Mississippi State fared less well, placing in the middle of the same pack with a 4 percentage point "underperformance" - which means its actual graduation rate was 4 points less than what was projected.

Then again, that's the reason the Pathfinder program was developed. In 1997, before Pathfinder was started, 26 percent of students received less than a 2.0 grade-point average at the end of their freshman year. That has come down to 22 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, freshman retention has risen to 80 percent from 74 percent in the same period.

One key to Pathfinder's success is identifying students who skip class within days rather than weeks of the start of a semester. If students miss more than a few classes, they get too far behind to recover. And that can lead to someone dropping out. Which is why it is critical to persuade faculty not to drag their feet.

"We had to convince professors that they had to be accurate taking role and reporting it right away," Mr. McMillen says. "Of course, getting faculty to do anything as a group is like herding cats. Many at first viewed it as as a bureaucratic exercise. But when we convinced them we were really going to use this for good - they went for it."

• E-mail claytonm@csps.com.

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