Abstract
The C4 Scholar Program (Cross Curricular Career Community) is an interdisciplinary, multi-semester learning community for first-year developmental students at a comprehensive midwestern state university. Faculty members from two units, Retention & Student Success and Arts and Sciences, created the program to address a persistent gap in retention between developmental and non-developmental first-year students. This article provides a description of the pilot phase and an explanation of how the ensuing comparative analysis led to adoption of a program framework based on business management literature. The framework, which was implemented with the next two cohorts, contributed to strong comparative gains in performance and retention.