S3 Campus Legends and Mysteries: A Potential for Improving Honors Students’ Institutional Retention Through Campus Lore

Presenters

Dr. Viktoria Basham, Clarke Honors College

Abstract

While honors students can be perceived as high-achieving, they can also be one of the vulnerable populations in terms of institutional retention due to heightened stress and anxiety levels, fear of failure, inability to make decisions, unrealistic expectations, and proneness to feelings of isolation and loneliness. Offering innovative honors classes that not only familiarize students with the identity of the organization, but also actively engage them with this identity by incorporating them into the creation of the institution’s rituals and traditions can not only improve the honors students’ institutional retention rates, but can also pave a path toward a more engaged alumni status. The Clarke Honors College at Salisbury University (SU) offered a “Campus Legends and Mysteries” class, which prompted students to create their original SU campus legends based on the research they conducted. The comments in the end-of-semester evaluations and the interviews given by the students for SU’s magazine The Sea Gull demonstrate that the class helped them develop a stronger and more personal bond with the institution by giving them the opportunity to leave a permanent trace on SU’s campus lore. These findings suggest that honors programs and colleges can benefit from offering courses modeled after the “Campus Legends and Mysteries” class not only in terms of helping students develop valuable transferrable skills through innovative and engaging experiences, but also in terms of helping with the overall institutional retention of honors students, which is important for the long-term financial wellbeing of the institution.

Session Recording