Higher Education Needs a Senior Launch

Comprehensive and intensive planning and programming for students’ first year in college has become a staple in higher education. The motivation for offering a first-year experience course, and either strongly encouraging it or requiring it, is because after recruiting students, the most important part is then retaining them.

But is that enough? Do colleges and universities not also have an ethical responsibility to students, families, and the larger community to offer just as much deep and thoughtful planning and programming for continuing students, particularly seniors?

Why We Must Focus on the Senior Experience

In response to this need, I believe institutions should think much more seriously about instituting what I’m calling The Senior Launch as an infrastructure of support for seniors to bookend the college experience. While there are some colleges claiming to be doing something of the sort, they’re often advertised as, “Need a credit? Take this.” Essentially, that’s cheap filler. What I’m speaking of is something immersive and deep that extends outward as students develop a sense of community beyond college when on their own.

Designed to socialize students into the entirety of the college experience, first-year courses serve as a sort of incubator: a space with intentionality for faculty and staff to help students chart their growth and ensure they’re on a good path to success. So too, Senior Launch courses would be a sort of socialization into life after college as well as an incubator for reflecting on the college journey, envisioning future growth, and creatively and strategically nurturing new opportunities, mentoring, and networking.

You might think with all the emphasis everywhere on the first-year experience as well as on experiential learning and internships that students would feel better prepared for the future. But, it seems like the reverse is true.

Emerging in a perfect storm of social media, over-parenting, a divisive political climate, reports of escalating mental health issues, and the experience of middle school and high school during the pandemic, students approach their senior year less mature and ready than ever before. After having individuated from families of origin to adjust to living at college, students in their senior year are once again leaving and individuating, this time from the community of the college. How might colleges and universities best support students at this tender time of transition as they strike out on their own?

Senior year is fraught with complicated emotions. Some students feel nostalgic, finally adjusted, settled, and wanting to remain cocooned on campus forever while others are itching to get out, feeling they’ve outgrown the place. And many students are somewhere in between, knowing they’ll miss their friends and certain aspects of the spontaneity of social life that college affords while excited, uncertain, and nervous about all that lies ahead.

What Students Say They Need

I see many graduates quickly stumble and become adrift. This is simultaneously a private trouble and a public, systemic issue. When I talk with students, what becomes clear is how lost so many of them feel. Cody, who graduated in 2016, confirmed this: “Life skills that you’re never taught honestly would have been amazing, because really you just graduate and kinda go, ‘okay, so now what’?”

It helps for students to have dedicated space to be reminded that during this time of individuation, there are thousands of other students like them scattering to different types of futures. Some may go after a job while others pursue graduate work, travel, or assume an internship, and to accomplish this, some may move back to their family’s home or venture somewhere entirely new.

Students share with me how much coaching they need for what we now commonly refer to as “adulting.” They’re hungry for life lessons, life hacks, and overall inspiration for leading their best lives. In response, I created a brand-new course called Adulting that has solidified for me why a Senior Launch is indeed essential. When people ask me what the class is about, I’ve boiled it down to this: it’s about creating a life worth living, about crafting the most meaningful, artful, bold, and vibrant life possible. Students have come of age more constricted, with so much engineered and pre-fabricated for them, from playdates to social media to AI. What they need are expansive opportunities for using their imagination, taking risks, making connections, and having real conversations.

So, What Might a Senior Launch Look Like?

What I’m proposing shouldn’t be confused with a senior seminar or senior capstone course as those denote something more purely academic and research-focused within one’s major discipline. The Senior Launch differs significantly in that it is academic, social, emotional, relational, and fully transdisciplinary; it’s more like a College to Life Capstone. It’s the synthesis of everything from all the preceding years and drawing on these to craft the brightest future possible. The Senior Launch would help students cultivate what I think of as essential C’s: curiosity, creativity, connections, contemplation, critical and connected thinking, compassion, and communication.

A simple Google search using phrases like “the senior experience at college” provides information on age-friendly campuses and senior citizens. The Senior Launch is lifelong learning of a different ilk. It would have a component to support students trying things they’ve longed to do, even if that results in a less than stellar performance. Because who cares and who’s watching? Perhaps they’ve wanted to learn to dance, sail, paint, or learn sign language. The thirst for lifelong learning is the best thing we can help students pack for their journey beyond college. Practically speaking, it will set them apart from others on the job market, position them for greater success throughout their professional lives, and make them more interesting people.

What’s evident is that students need and want places for:

brainstorming about the future and getting reality checks on their ideas and plans overcoming the fears of being on the telephone, especially with older adults networking sharpening cover letters and a resume, as well as learning to interview well, follow up appropriately with thank you notes, and prepare for follow-up interviews evaluating their presentation on and offline thinking through their values adjusting to a life that’s not structured around school negotiating salaries and managing money exploring possibilities of further schooling and full-time work considering the future of intimate relationships and marriage as well as friendships thinking through work/life balance

Students benefit from talking with their peers about these things and swapping ideas. Interview-based assignments, where they seek out older people for adulting advice, add further enrichment.

Students benefit from learning to balance out the level of seriousness and concern for their futures with reveling in the present moment and some of the freedom that college provides. These are huge lessons to take into one’s life beyond college as most of us experience the tug of future worries while wanting to savor the present moment. Balancing work and play are pivotal, and college is an ideal place to hone this. In our roles as faculty, staff, and administrators, we owe it to students to think this through with them.

Ideally, a Senior Launch would include community-connected experiences that support students in networking with people in their chosen field for opportunities to gather more information, to shadow them, and gain experience. This might begin with inviting intriguing speakers to classes and for campus-wide panels and events. Cody said: “In my graduate program, I’ve had the opportunity to hear from all kinds of people in different fields of counseling which opened my eyes to just how many specialties there are that I may otherwise have never discovered. Being able to have something similar in undergrad to help show us some of those lesser known options would have been cool.”

Importantly, Cody pointed out the value in free counseling offered at colleges that can sometimes be under-utilized, especially in the senior transition. “It’s maybe the only time some people will ever truly have access to the service.” Cody’s point underscores the importance of The Senior Launch being about helping students strengthen emotional intelligence, hone their own inner resources, and know how and when to find buoys. In the age of AI, we must push students to their farthest edge to consider how to craft an AI that matters — that is, what I would call, an Authentically Intelligent life. An Authentically Intelligent life is one that is less reliant on and mediated by screens and instead guided by following one’s unique passions and capacities.

Cristina Conte, an assistant dean at Central Connecticut State University, shared that the student population where she works is made up of a significant percentage of transfer students, with the majority coming from the community college system. “Therefore, these students likely missed out on the basic first-year experience tips and have navigated college on their own. It’s not safe to assume that a student entering their junior year has been exposed to, or mastered some of the basic supports and skills needed to successfully navigate the world post-grad…They arrive at college with less of a college mindset than the students from years ago,” Cristina said.

The Senior Launch Bolsters the Future for Both Students and Institutions

The concept of The Senior Launch benefits more than seniors. Universities, too, would be building an even stronger alumni base. And that’s because a final life lesson worthy of being showcased in The Senior Launch is helping students as they come to the awareness that they’ll never live exactly this way again. The reality is that given life’s impermanence, things are always changing and we’re likely to feel that way many times in our lives, but there’s something so unique about the set-up of college that the anticipation of leaving it and the transition out is almost like no other.

A former student, Chris, told me, “I made sure to make the most of every minute because even back then, I knew one day I’d wish I could go back.” Chris’s remark reminds me of something powerful that’s inscribed on the campus of Miami University: “To think that in such a place, I led such a life.” Senior Launch programs would deepen and extend this sentiment even further, propelling students to live out the rest of their lives with that same spirit.