In 1999 the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA and the Policy Center on the First Year of College at Brevard College joined forces to develop an instrument to ". . . enhance local and national assessment of the first college year. . . (Sax, et al., 2002, p.6)." Both of these groups had been involved in studying college students and their experiences for many years. The YFCY was developed to measure curricular and co-curricular experiences during the first year and to provide follow-up data to the Cooperative Institutional Research Program Freshman Survey (CIRP) that was given to entering first year students. OSU participated in the YFCY for the first time in 2003.
