First Semester Counts

I learned an interesting tidbit during my professor’s digression this morning. He was talking about how most colleges have complex equations that attempt to correlate various data points with future success. This helps them to pick candidates that will do well in their institutions and go on to do even greater things. I don’t think it’s as crude as plugging in an applicant’s info – GPA, # of AP courses, # of years of foreign language, family income, etc. – and spitting out a list of who to accept and who to not accept, but I also don’t think they don’t use this kind of quantitative stuff at all. If you’re an admissions office, you’d be stupid not to.

Anyway, the point my prof was making was that as complex as these equations can get, they are only reasonably useful in predicting success up to the first semester in college. Forget future success years out, or even a couple years out, or even for the four years of college itself. We’re talking three months.

You might think my takeaway from this tidbit was that such equations are useless. But you forget that I’m into this kind of stuff, being a bit of a stat geek. If I think past baseball stats can help predict future baseball success, then surely I can buy that past high school performance can help predict future college and life success.

What came to mind for me right away was not to discount colleges for trying to find a magic equation for their applicants. Rather, I thought of just how important those first three months of college are for your future success. My interpretation of my prof’s point was that everything leading up to your first semester in college can explain how you’ll do in your first semester in college. But your first semester in college can explain how you’ll do for the rest of your life. Will you develop good study habits or bad ones? Will you stay on the straight and narrow or go astray? Will you get involved, get inspired, get challenged? Or will you drift, purposeless and causeless, for the rest of your life?

Of course, it’s not to say that good decisions in your first three months in college guarantees you a good life, or that bad decisions in your first three months in college can’t be overcome. But the experiences you have in that very short time window can and do change your whole life. Christian fellowships that do significant outreach to freshmen should take heed. So should the colleges themselves in terms of how they organize orientation and student life. And of course, parents and pastors and coaches and every other adult that sends a kid off to school should keep an eye out. That first semester is not a throwaway; it counts.