The First-Year Student As Immigrant

This paper offers a meaningful and unifying model for understanding the social and psychological dimensions of the student's transition from high school to college. This model rests on the analogy to the immigrant experience. The student's first-year experience is a process of resocialization to a new cultural environment very much like the process that immigrants experience upon their arrival in their new homeland. This resocialization process involves culture shock, "language" acquisition, and the internalization of academic, bureaucratic, and social norms as well as the values and expectations of the college milieu.