Discover 3 College Programs That Help Students Thrive

When it comes to searching for colleges, students should zero in on places that not only feel like a good fit, but also that work at getting students engaged in campus life. A growing number of schools are implementing certain "high-impact" practices that have been shown to make a big difference to happiness and success.

Participating in such practices, enhances students' "connection to an institution and makes their experience more meaningful," says Alexander McCormick, associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University--Bloomington and director of the National Survey of Student Engagement, which tracks the ways students get involved in their education. These experiences also cultivate abilities employers seek most, including critical thinking, problem-solving, and teamwork skills.

Here are a few types of programs to look out for:

[Check out the schools that topped the 2016 Best Colleges rankings.]

Service Learning

In "service learning" courses, students alternate time in the classroom with related community service required as part of the course. The issues students tackle out in the field are the same as or related to the ones they study in class, so they apply theory gleaned from their lessons in real settings and then reflect on the fieldwork back on campus.

Not all service learning is equal in value. The difference is huge, for instance, between Tulane University, where students choose among 100 courses built around service and are required to take two in order to graduate, and a school that simply corrals whoever is willing for a campuswide day of volunteerism each year.

Another more intangible benefit is that students quickly get "embedded" in the community, observes Tulane Provost Michael Bernstein. Freshman retention and graduation rates have both risen at Tulane since university leaders challenged students to help repair the city after Hurricane Katrina.

Learning Communities

Learning communities aren't just for freshmen, but they are another tool many colleges are using to provide the best possible first-year experience. A well-designed community typically puts a group of students into at least two courses together and gets them working collaboratively.

At Elon University in North Carolina, where groups of freshmen take several core First-Year Foundations courses together, T. Giles Roll, a sophomore from Bloomington, Illinois, recalls that his Global Experience course, in particular, "challenged me like no other class." Roll, a finance major in the Leadership Fellows program, was grouped with 20 other fellows for the class, which asks students to consider such questions as individual responsibility in a global context and the relationship of humans to the natural world.

Elon also has implemented a number of themed "living-learning" communities that turbocharge the experience by adding a residential component. The goal is to keep the intellectual debate and social interactions continuing outside of class, notes Jon Dooley, assistant vice president for student life.

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Study Abroad

Colleges have been sending students abroad for a century, but the experience is no longer mainly about gaining exposure to a different culture and practicing the language. More often now "it's about making use of locations" to provide students across majors with an international perspective to take into their field, says Jim Lucas, assistant dean for global education and curriculum at Michigan State University.

MSU Spartans have numerous ways to gain a global experience, from spring-break travel and study trips that run four to six weeks to the traditional semester abroad.

Recent chemical engineering grad Mario Gutierrez spent one month in Sweden and Germany exploring renewable energies. He visited a Swedish paper mill that harnesses the heat produced making paper to co-generate electricity, for example, and learned about how biogas, a gaseous fuel created by the breakdown of organic matter that isn't common in the U.S., is used in Germany. "It gave me a different perspective on engineering," says Gutierrez, a first-generation college student from Powell, Wyoming, who also took four spring break trips to volunteer at orphanages in Mexico.

[See rankings of the Best Global universities.]

Senior Capstone

One of the chief benefits of ending your college career with a "capstone" project is that it gives you a strong taste of the way problem-solving in the real world works. The exercise, intended to get students to integrate all that they've learned and apply it, could be a research project, a portfolio, a performance or a work experience.

As they delve into their chosen topics, says Arthur Heinricher, dean of undergraduate studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, students often realize that success is going to require dealing with "gaps in their knowledge." WPI requires a "major qualifying project" of all seniors. Each project is guided by a faculty adviser, but many students -- about one-third of the group this past year -- elect an experience that involves working for an outside employer.

Having to "adapt on the fly" is often cited by graduates as being one of their most valuable takeaways. "You really have to learn on the job," says Peter Shorrock, a 2014 grad in biomedical engineering whose yearlong project entailed designing a method to test a cardiac monitoring sensor developed by FLEXcon, a nearby company.

Capstone projects are so valuable, says Debra Humphreys, vice president for policy and public engagement at the Association of American Colleges & Universities, that the group is "doubling down" to get more members to require them.

This story is excerpted from the U.S. News "Best Colleges 2016" guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.