Freshman seminars are a ubiquitous offering in higher education, but they have not been evaluated using matched comparisons with data at scale. In this work, we use transcript data on over 76,000 students to examine the impact of first-year interest groups (FIGs) on student graduation and retention. We first apply propensity score matching on course-level data to account for selection bias. We find that graduation and re-enrollment rates for FIG students were higher than non-FIG students, an effect that was more pronounced for self-identified underrepresented racial minority students. We then employ topic modeling to analyze survey responses from over 12,500 FIG students to find that social aspects of FIGs were most beneficial to students. Interestingly, references to social aspects were not disproportionately present in the responses of self-identified underrepresented racial minority students.

新生研讨会在高等教育中无处不在，但尚未通过与大规模数据的匹配比较进行评估。在这项工作中，我们使用超过 76,000 名学生的成绩单数据来检查第一年兴趣小组 (FIG) 对学生毕业和保留的影响。我们首先在课程级数据上应用倾向得分匹配来解释选择偏差。我们发现，FIG 学生的毕业率和重新入学率高于非 FIG 学生，这种影响对于自我认同的少数族裔学生来说更为明显。然后，我们采用主题建模来分析来自 12,500 多名 FIG 学生的调查回复，以发现 FIG 的社交方面对学生最有益。有趣的是，