Over the past twenty years, the attention that colleges and universities have paid to students' first year experience has grown exponentially. The reasons for this phenomenon include changes in demographic characteristics of the students themselves, concerns about the high dropout rate that peaks between the first and second year, and recognition that the first year presents a unique opportunity to engage students in the habits of learning. The vast majority of American postsecondary institutions are currently offering one or more special initiatives focused on helping first-year students make a successful transition to higher education. But heretofore, campuses have lacked any systematic, valid definition of, or standards for, first-year excellence that go beyond a single best-practice program to a broader characterization of a campus's total approach to the first year. While faculty and administrators are often hesitant to embrace standards or to measure themselves against external benchmarks, they nevertheless are hungry for models of excellence, for approaches that work to produce higher levels of student learning and retention. To meet both a need and a desire for a valid model of excellence against which to measure institutional efforts in the first year, the Policy Center on the First Year of College is engaged in a two-year pilot project entitled "Foundations of Excellence[TM] in the First College Year" to define and validate such first-year standards. This article describes the Foundations of Excellence project as a new model for first-year assessment and what the project adds to existing assessment of the first year.