To help schools recruit and retain their students without lowering academic standards, a full semester freshman seminar designed to train new college students in the skills they will need is proposed. The importance of this approach in light of the growing competition among colleges and universities to attract students is discussed. Increased access to education has made the traditional freshman orientation inadequate and requires that orientation programs change their focus to meet student needs. A step-by-step approach to establishing and teaching a freshman orientation seminar is presented, based on the experiences of Hunter College's Freshmen Seminar Program. The fundamentals of curriculum design and content as well as teaching methods for the seminar are described, including: lesson plans, games, attitude inventories, and role playing. The three curricular components of the freshman seminar are: information, skills, and attitudes toward being a student. Remedial courses and other activities include note-taking, test taking, class participation, interacting with instructors, and developing realistic attitudes towards learning. The goal of the freshman seminar is viewed as attitudinal: to help the entering college student see himself as an active participant in the process of learning rather than a passive recipient of an educational system. Formats of seminar sessions are described and three classroom dialogues are provided. Appended are a course description, course information sheet, and program planning exercise. A selected bibliography is included. (BH)