Are you helping your students to plan ahead? Incoming freshmen are highly receptive to career-planning assistance

Released this spring, the new 2012 report The Attitudes and Needs of Freshmen at Mid-Year from Noel-Levitz measures, among other things, the receptivity of incoming freshman students to various types of career-planning assistance. The report contains data from the Mid-Year Student Assessment, which assesses students halfway through the freshman year. This instrument shows how many students have received assistance, as well as how their receptivity to assistance and other attitudes may have changed during the first half of the school year. The results are based on comparative data from the start of the year in the 2012 National Freshman Attitudes Report.

The data in the image above show that although well over half of all freshmen surveyed last fall were interested in creating an educational plan that would prepare them for their careers, many had yet to receive that help by the midpoint of their first year. Most notably, a full 70 percent of the study’s freshmen respondents at four-year public institutions indicated their interest in creating an educational plan, yet only 45.8 percent of these students said they received this assistance prior to taking the mid-year assessment.

Along with this data, this report also highlights up to 12 additional areas where the number of incoming freshmen receptive to assistance exceeded their actual usage of support services by mid-year, as well as 29 changes in attitudes among freshmen between the start and the middle of the school year.

Read the complete findings by downloading the 2012 report: The Attitudes and Needs of Freshmen at Mid-Year.