A Different Road To College: A Guide For Transitioning Non-Traditional Students
The introduction contains a good definition of the non-traditional student that such students would identify with. Much of the introduction contains graphics and other information that they would probably skip and is of more interest to the instructor.
Chapter 1 has good material about why students go to college but could do more with focusing on the students themselves. There is a set of questions; suggestions for use could be provided.
The material in Chapter 2 is useful in selecting a college, but if the intended audience is students who have already enrolled in college, it would not be applicable to them. It also seems very broad-based for such an essential area.
The discussion of “college vocabulary” in Chapter 4 is extremely useful for the target audience: a nontraditional student unfamiliar with navigating “college.”
Chapter 5’s discussion of college schedules contains a general overview of issues students will face but would benefit from more specific advice and resources other than the ones mentioned, or at least advice on how to locate resources that would help with this issue.
The discussion of college Web sites in Chapter 6 is woefully inadequate. It simply addresses the difficulties with navigating colleges’ public sites without including a discussion of tools like the student portal like Banweb or Learning Management Systems like Blackboard or D2L. Most students likely don’t even look at the public Web site after they are enrolled.
Chapter 7’s discussion of placement testing seems more appropriate for students who have not yet enrolled, not who are already enrolled.
“Understanding College Expenses” is vital information for students both before and after enrollment, so students would definitely benefit from reading this chapter. There are entire books and Web sites devoted to about this topic, but this chapter is a good introduction. The following chapter on scholarships is equally useful.
Chapter 11 on “Pulling It All Together” provides a nice ending to the book and gives students an opportunity for self-reflection about their own college experiences.
Since the author is a community college instructor whose students are the “nontraditional” kind that she intends this book for, the information she provides is from first-hand experience. There were a few places that could have benefited from more development, but the book is generally accurate. It is also reasonably unbiased.
The content is relevant and can be easily updated. Some references to Lane Community College specifically would not be applicable to students from other institutions. There are also links throughout the text to additional material; some thought might be given to making these fixed or checking them regularly to make sure they remain relevant.
The author also seems to assume that the target audience is community college students. There are some references to the practices of universities and four-year colleges, but a good deal of the content discusses “college” from the point of view of a two-year college student. This is particularly evident in Chapter 10
The author assumes a conversational but academically appropriate tone, addressing the reader as “you.” However, there are frequent shifts from this second-person, more informal style to third-person, which make the flow sometimes jarring.
The text achieves a good balance of consistency between discussing general and specific matters. Terminology is defined and used consistently.
While the individual chapters each have a discrete topic that could be used in any order, some seem more apropos to students prior to their enrollment in college and therefore less useful in a college success class.
The book refers to a number of TED Talks and other Web resources, which adds a multimedia element, but the PDF versions do not provide descriptions, instructions, links, or printed URLs. The “Online” version does.
Several tables within the book seem to suffer from formatting issues in the PDF versions that are not present in the “Online” version.
There are 5 downloadable file formats and an “Online” version. This makes for easy offline usage, but the online option is a good alternative. Also, some guidance about which app(s) would be best used with a particular format would be useful for the less experienced user.
Chapter titles are listed in the Table of Contents, but the formatting seems to have left them out of the individual chapters in the PDF versions.
The text contains a number of colon, quotation mark/punctuation, capitalization, and sentence fragment errors. The following word errors were also noted.
Introduction, p. 4: I have witnessing the struggle and confusion [should be “witnessed”]
Chapter 1, p. 12: How you define success in relationship to your college experience [“in relationship to” should be “in relation to”]
Chapter 7, p. 65: The placement test can be referred to as CPT or CTP exam. [this seems to be a typo—similar mistakes are made throughout the chapter—if they refer to different things, the text needs to be clearer]
The text is careful to use gender-inclusive language (he/she, usage of third-person point of view). There are no references to culture other than first-year college students. Ethnicity and other culture identifications are certainly relevant to non-traditional students, but the author does not address them specifically. Perhaps this could be done in future updates; it might be helpful.
The overall strength of this book is that it was written by someone with a lot of insider knowledge about this topic. The drawback is its intent. Is it aimed at students prior to enrollment in college or after? While it contains good, general information about navigating “college,” it seems more appropriate as a guidebook for prospective students rather than a textbook for students in a college success class.