Characteristics of commuter students
Common challenges for commuter students encompassed navigating their commutes, negotiating shared spaces at home and on campus, managing their access to technology, and grappling with technology inadequacies and failures.
Commuter students:
- Are more likely than residential students to have responsibilities apart from their roles on campus. These responsibilities may be as basic as cooking their own meals but they are also likely to include working full- or part-time, child care, family or community obligations, and more. The non-academic demands on the lives of commuter students impact their experiences as college students differently than for residential students.
- Often must negotiate living spaces with family, roommates, or others outside of the learning institution. All students need access to a range of spaces for homework and studying, but commuter students may especially value campus spaces since their home or other off-campus locations may not be conducive to academic work.
- Have a different relationship to the physical place of their college than do residential students. Students who commute carry their belongings with them all day. When they are on campus, many commuter students spend much of their time negotiating obstacles, including finding places to create academic and non-academic space.
- Spend less time on both studying alone and studying in groups than students who live on campus6 and often fit their studying into the time between classes or other on-campus activities. It is important that they be able to find a suitable study space in the time they have available and that options are provided that address their unique needs.
- Tend to minimize the amount of time they spend on campus, and are thus less involved in college-related activities
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Other Library facilities & services
Students understand and can articulate an institutional and cultural expectation of the library as a place for scholarly work; many choose to study in a library for this reason. For commuter students, the library is a place to seek a transformative experience, a place where they are able to be students first and foremost. So important is the organizing effect of the library as place that for students who describe themselves as academically motivated, finding a “serious” library was imperative to creating an adequate space for study. Students appreciate design and furnishings that indicate that the library is a place for serious academic work. While collections may be shifting to include more digital than physical volumes, librarians should consider ways to retain the academic atmosphere that book stacks convey.
Commuting students and those struggling academically are the most in need of libraries and their services, but are not typically the library’s heaviest users. To serve them better, libraries will have to give them more targeted attention in the future. One approach to consider is to provide places where commuters can easily access a variety of study settings and resources; another is to put in place a network of outreach facilities tailored to the special needs of lower-performing students.
Generally recommended facilities changes informed by ethnographic studies include:
- Locating the highest profile services on the main floor
- Increasing technology hubs and offerings
- Establishing/formalizing defined study areas based on observed student work practices and preferences
- Diversifying the types of work spaces offered to students
- Reducing print collections and reconfiguring book stacks to free up space for other uses
- Developing effective monitoring and outreach within the libraries to identify and respond more quickly to patron needs
- Improving consultation areas in which library employees can work with students
- Realigning the staffing structure to better support student-focused initiatives
- Increasing the use of student employees to provide peer-to-peer services
- Partnering with the college to provide online and embedded in-person support services to students
