I’ve always been about information-informed decision making. The current health crisis reminded me of a much smaller and less harmful situation I was involved with back in 2002 at Dartmouth College. An outbreak of conjunctivitis was spreading rapidly through the campus and we just did not have the information we needed to deal with the crisis. The Center for Disease Control came to campus to try to help when we quickly realized we needed more information.

About one in four college freshmen leave their school do not return for their sophomore year. So why, when faced with such a big problem, would I decide to talk instead about the importance of experiential learning in college at the Annual Conference on the First-Year Experience?