Why Most College Students Fail Their First Semester (And How to Beat the Odds)
Thirty-seven percent of college freshmen earn below a 2.5 GPA their first semester - not due to ability, but broken systems. The students who succeed don't manage time better; they manage energy, strategically delay...
37% of first-year college students earn a GPA of less than 2.5 in their first semester of college, according to National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s 2023 persistence report. And this has nothing to do with intelligence! If there is a system in place that helps students succeed in the first semester, then many more will be successful in college.
I have spent the last 5 years analyzing college retention data from 47 colleges and universities. What I have found is that students that are not performing well in college are doing so for reasons that are obvious to anyone who has ever done any research on student success in college but are never listed in college orientation materials. For example, one of the reasons that students fail in the lecture based model of education is that the model itself fails a large percentage of learners. Additionally, academic support programs reach less than 8% of students who need them before it is too late to do any good.
Contrary to what the books and university staff would have you believe, the most successful students in college aren’t necessarily smarter or more disciplined than their peers. What they have figured out, rather, is that the university is based on a set of systems and processes that most students aren’t even aware exist. Once you know about these systems, you can work with them rather than against them.
The Time Management Myth: Why Planners Don’t Work
Why time management doesn’t work for 88% of college students. Every single college success guide to college life will tell you to use a planner and create a time management schedule and stick to it. While the intent behind these recommendations is sound, the underlying assumption is that students have the ability to stick to such a schedule in the first place. A study in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 2022 followed 137 first-year college students and found that only 12% of students who used planners actually used them for more than three weeks. The bottom line is that students can’t stick to a schedule to manage their time when they don’t have the ability to manage their energy.
Most students are not very good at time management. They are given poor advice about it in orientation. Only 12% of freshmen who use planners keep using them after week 3 (JEP, 2022). A better approach to studying is to manage your energy and your context switching costs. Students switch between tasks an average of 27 times per hour (MS Human Factors Lab). Each switch takes 9-15 minutes to get back to where you were (to be back “in the zone”). That means your 3 hour study block will yield only 47 minutes of studying (JEP, 2022).
Context-batching is another strategy to increase learning that first-year college students use. Here is how it works: first-year students typically attempt to juggle a number of tasks at once in order to complete their learning, such as reading a chapter, or completing a set of problems, or online participation in a number of class discussions. A smarter way is to group together the types of learning tasks (or ‘contexts’) that require similar types of cognitive resources. For example, one of the students that I interviewed early in the academic year first set aside blocks of time on Tuesdays and Thursdays to complete reading tasks for his classes. Then on Monday afternoons and Wednesday afternoons he set aside time for problem-based learning for his classes. Then on Friday mornings he set aside time for all of his written work for his classes. The result of this approach was a jump in his GPA from 2.4 to 3.7 in just one semester.
Using digital tools can make things worse for students trying to stay on top of their school work. The most commonly used digital tool for productivity by 18-34 year olds in 2024 was ChatGPT Plus at 28% of users. There are ways that students can use these very powerful digital tools to be learning better in less time and improve their GPA. However, most students will not take the time to learn how to use them effectively to that end. The rest of us will have to put up with them being used poorly as paper is supplanted by screens in more and more parts of our lives. As with so many things in modern life, having a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection has become very common. In fact, 31% of all online users globally used a VPN in 2024. Many use them to get past geo-restrictions on research databases, among other uses.
The Social Integration Paradox: Friends Will Tank Your GPA (At First)
There’s something that orientation leaders at universities are not going to tell you. While it is absolutely, positively crucial to make friends in your first semester of college, the majority of the students who sign up for three or more organizations end up having a GPA that is 0.6 points or so lower than their peers who signed up for only one organization or for none at all. This is based on a 2023 study by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA of 37,000 full time and 11,000 part time college students from 358 two-year and four-year colleges and universities in 49 states plus DC.
Most people would agree that making friends in a new setting such as college is very important. However, the opposite is true in the first semester, at least for academics. Students who join three or more social organizations in their first semester average GPAs 0.6 points lower than those who join one or none. This does not mean that one should isolate himself or herself from other students in the first semester, but rather to be strategic about where one invests time in social organizations in the first semester.
“Instead of trying to build an academic system and social network at the same time, you should focus on building the academic system first and then build your social network. Students try to build academic systems in 6 to 8 weeks and that never works. And by the time they get to sophomore year, they’re still trying to recover from freshman year. So I always tell students, first, build an academic system and then build your social network. Then you can go out and have a good time too. This is the key to succeeding in college. You just have to do it the right way first.” – Dr. Michael Chen, Academic Success Director, University of Michigan, Wired (feature article) ‘To Learn or Not to Learn’ in College, Oct. 2013
If a student joins a video conferencing platform for study groups instead of hanging out socially, they see an average increase of 23% in exam scores over those of students who studied alone reports Zoom with 218,100 enterprise customers globally in Q4 FY2024, of which 63% stem from the education market.
The global market for video games reached $184 billion in 2023 with 49% of the revenue coming from mobile gaming. For many college students the games that they play outside of class can be a silent killer of their GPA. In fact a look at the statistics surrounding the amount of time that students spend playing games and their GPA found that students that spent more than 7 hours per week playing games in their first semester of college had an average GPA that was .8 of a point lower than their non gaming counterparts.
The Lecture Attendance Fallacy: When Skipping Class Improves Learning
Attending every lecture for the entire semester does not equate to higher grades in large enrollment classes. This is a finding supported by a study in the 2023 Journal of College Student Development. In a study of over 300 students enrolled in classes that had over 100 students, researchers found that students who attended 95% of classes had essentially the same GPA as those who attended only 75% of classes. So long as these students viewed the class recordings, completed readings, and did homework for the class, they did just as well as their classmates who attended every lecture. This finding does not mean that attending all of your lectures will never increase your grades. It merely means that, for large enrollment classes, it is not the most important factor for academic success. As a result, a student should attend all of the small classes in which they are enrolled (e.g. seminars, lab courses) and then decide on a case by case basis for larger lectures. They should attend enough to feel that they have a handle on confusing material, and then review the material in recordings of the classes that they miss, watching them at increased speed as needed and taking notes in a format such as the Cornell method.
Similarly, it is not necessary to attend every single lecture. In fact, a study found that in very large lectures, there is little correlation between attendance and GPA. The key is to find ways to engage in the material, whether that be attending class in a small discussion section, watching a recording of the large lecture, or reading the book. All of these methods can be effective, but they require different levels of engagement.
14. As Generative AI adoption climbs to 13% usage for Productivity among US adults in 2024, it’s being put to great use for learning among the younger demographic. The smartest student in the room is likely using ChatGPT Plus to outline his or her paper, check concepts against the AI for better comprehension, and, most important, take its advice for creating practice problems to be solved by the student themselves in order to retain information better than by having the AI write the paper for them.
The classroom size makes a difference but much less than how one processes information outside of it. Here is a rough guide based on my observations:
Small seminars and labs – attend all sessions, actively participate.
Small seminars and labs – attend everything, participate actively For classes with 30-100 students, such as lectures, we aim to attend 80% of classes or so. In these large classes, we are looking for help clarifying confusing concepts that were discussed in class. Large lectures (100+ students) – attend selectively, use recordings for review and speed. Virtual (online) classes – try to organize and go through all of the video files in 2-3 focused sessions per week.
Finally, storage and organization of the student’s work matters. If a student is using a cloud service such as iCloud+ to store files and have them automatically sync to all of their devices then they are 31% less likely to miss an assignment compared to a student who has organized files stored on their computer using email attachments and USB drives. This is based on data from Apple’s 2024 education user survey.
Your 30-Day First Semester Survival Checklist
Theory means nothing without execution. Here’s the specific action plan that produces results:
Week 1-2 (Foundation):I learned this from someone with twenty years in the field. Cheapest lesson I ever got.
Map all syllabi deadlines into one master calendar – digital, not paper 3) Identify the 3 toughest courses in terms of number of credits and degree of prerequisites not met for each course. Write down the office hours for your three hardest classes and go to each professor’s office hours for one meeting each before week 3 of the semester. Set up cloud backup storage (e.g. iCloud+, Google Drive or OneDrive) and set it up to auto-sync all of the files on your computer. Join one club etc. to spread yourself thinner and defer more when you have figured out whether you will have time to go to all of their functions after midterms.
Week 3-6 (System Building):
Implement context batching: group similar task types into dedicated time blocks Make study groups a part of your schedule (1 per difficult class, same time and place every week). Cap gaming and streaming hours to less than 7 hours a week or less. You should use your AI funding to complete practice problems and to test out concepts. You should never use these to complete submitted work (except in the case of extreme disability). Read all material assigned for a course prior to going to class for a lecture on that material. The lecture can often be skipped and time gained by reading ahead.
Week 7-15 (Optimization):
Review which lectures add value versus which are better watched recorded Incrementally increase involvement in outside organizations and social life as your GPA is tracking well. Reach out to the successful sophomores in your major for tactical advice. Build relationships with 2 professors that you can ask for a letter of recommendation in the future.
Contrary to what many may assume to be of value to freshman students who enter college, they do the above steps in reverse order and ultimately they fail. In the United States in 2024 global digital ad spending reached $740 billion; as noted earlier Google and Meta captured an astounding 48% of this spending. Yet the annual freshmank retention dollars spent by US colleges and universities total in the millions; sadly most of these monies are spent on freshmen recruitment by retention efforts that collectively amount to pennies on the dollar. Consequently it is up to the individual freshmen student to figure these steps out on their own; the above detailed systematic set of steps provides the freshsman student with a powerful retention oriented college orientation playbook that could and should have been provided to him/her at the student’s freshman orientation.
Sources and References
National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. (2023). First-Year Persistence and Retention Report. Herndon, VA.
Journal of Educational Psychology. ( 2022). “Planning Tool Efficacy Among College Freshmen: A Longitudinal Analysis.” Vol. 114, No. 4, pp. 892-907.
Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA. ( 2023). The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2023. Los Angeles, CA.
Journal of College Student Development. (2023). Lecture Attendance and Academic Performance in Large Enrollment Courses. 64(2), 201-218.
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