YSU Center offers programs to help students succeed in college

About 70 percent of students who use the center return in the fall, the director said.
By JoANNE VIVIANO
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- When Anthony Candel started taking classes at Youngstown State University in 1991 he was what he called a "traditional student."
The Niles resident hung out at the bar and skipped classes.
He also failed his courses and was kicked out in 1992.
Seven years later, YSU took him back, forcing him to undergo academic counseling for two quarters.
Candel had decided eight years of being lazy was enough. He was ready to learn when he walked through the doors of YSU's Center for Student Progress for the first meeting with his counselor.
And that's when things started to change.
"Everything I did up to that point in my life, I did the opposite the last three years," Candel said.
Today, he still often walks through those doors.
There, Candel, 29, has made friends, found support, and learned study skills, time management and goal setting.
The junior high school student who never took a book home from school is now a college senior who marks his books with yellow highlighter and never gets a grade lower than a B.
Striving for goals
He said his friends from high school would likely be surprised to see him now: Instead of focusing on drinks, he's setting goals, eager to earn his exercise science degree, go to graduate school at UCLA and, eventually, earn a Ph.D. from Harvard.
He founded a campus chapter of a national honor fraternity and has earned scholarship awards, including one of four awarded by the Ohio Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance.
Candel made the dean's list his first term back and now carries a grade point average of 3.23.
"If I have to play the game of life," he said, "I play to win and I want the best."
He said the initial fundamentals given to him by the staff at the Center for Student Progress have helped make the difference.
The goal of the center, on the west end of Kilcawley Center, is to help first-year students set goals and manage time so they survive that first year and come back to YSU as sophomores.
The center began in 1997, pooling the resources of four separate university services, said Jonelle Beatrice, center director.
Among students who seek assistance at the center, 67 percent to 71 percent return the next fall, Beatrice said. She said that compares with an overall national return rate of 63 percent at open-enrollment universities like YSU.
Making the transition
Many of the students who use the center were successful in high school but they "come to college and the game changes, the strategy changes," and they're no longer getting straight As.
Counselors at the center help them develop an individualized plan that considers outside influences and helps sort through priorities and goals.
"It's something you're not seeing at most institutions," Beatrice said. "Many of these students have needs beyond academics. ... I think the population at YSU is very nontraditional. Many of our students work, many of them have families, children and other priorities."
Aside from counselors, each entering student who attends orientation is assigned a peer mentor, an upper-level, trained student, to meet with regularly.
The mentors have office space in the center, sign contracts with students, monitor their grades and help them with scheduling. If a student gets a C or lower, they are referred to tutors.
Also through the center, graduate students are paid to attend targeted undergraduate classes and to hold open after-class study sessions three times each week.
The center offers study groups among classmates. And free tutors are available to help with a variety of subjects from study skills to math to foreign language.
"We're teaching students how to learn as well as what to learn," Beatrice said.