At this past weekend’s meeting of the American Sociological Association, Regina Deil-Amen, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Arizona, and Sara Goldrick-Rab, an assistant professor of educational-policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison presented their paper, “Institutional Transfer and the Management of Risk in Higher Education” (see Chronicle article at http://bit.ly/2BD0gU). The paper assesses the risk faced by first-generation college students of undergoing “reverse transfer,” where a student initially enrolled in a four-year college shifts into a two-year college, eventually leaving college without a Bachelor’s Degree. Not surprisingly, this risk is higher among low-income and minority students, who lack many of the support mechanisms available to their higher-income peers.

According to Godrick-Rab and Deil-Amen, students who do manage to overcome this risk tend to share four important resources:

guidance in developing their college plans, clear goals, an ability to find academic and financial help, and advocates pushing them to earn bachelor’s degrees.

As the college guidance season warms up in many countries, I’d urge schools to consider ways in which publishing an OCW site would help you provide your first-generation students with 3.5 of these resources.

First, the ability to see your courses is a valuable part of making plans based upon your courses. A thoughtfully-designed OCW site indicates a course’s:

• prerequisites
• fulfillment of curricular requirements
• course learning goals
• schedule and
• assignments

in addition to allowing a student to preview content in order to really see whether a given course meets her particular needs. For the student coming into an advisor’s office, an OCW site allows for better-informed advising. For the student reluctant to visit an advisor, an OCW site provides the means for self-help.

Second, the setting of clear goals requires a realistic sense of what might be required for college success. OCW courses can lay out for your students what kinds of challenges they will face as they make their way through your curriculum. If you have a goal-setting session as part of new student orientation, consider posting that session to your ocw site so that students can come back to it once they have developed a sense of what it will mean to them. The University of Notre Dame tried this last year, publishing its “Making the Academic Adjustment To College” course on its OCW site. Not only were new students required to access the course prior to enrolling, but many came back after the semester was underway. The course has exercises on goal-setting, and time will tell whether those exercises stand ND students in good stead over the next few years.

Third, an OCW site may not provide students with access to financial help (though well-informed essays might gain more scholarships for their authors), but it does provide access to academic help they might not otherwise receive. Deil-Amen and Goldrick-Rab cite a student they call “Monique” who fails to reach out to her professors for academic help and ends up transferring out of her four-year college. For students like Monique, the ability to review a course on an OCW site might well enable her to:

• engage in self-help at a different pace than she encounters in class
• engage a fellow student for help with course materials they both can see
• develop better-informed questions and thus muster the courage to reach out to her professors.

Let’s admit it, going into a professor’s office while suffering from a state of confusion is terribly daunting. While most of us probably think that developing faculty contacts is the way to go, we first must give students preparation for out-of-class engagement with the faculty.

Finally, advocates pushing first generation college students to earn bachelor’s degrees will come from many different aspects of a student’s life. An OCW site allow those advocates to inform themselves about what a student is facing in the college classroom and to tailor advice accordingly. Alienation from the very people who helped a student get to college is a phenomenon experienced by many first generation college students, and the ability to share the academic excitement with the folks back home is one of the many social gifts OCW has to offer.

None of these benefits is automatic. They require careful design of OCW courses and careful presentation to alert users to their potential. Nevertheless, OCW offers considerable potential to those at work on retention issues, so that care will be amply rewarded.