How Libraries Can Meet the Extracurricular Needs of Community-College Students

The approximately 8.7 million students at community colleges enroll with wide-ranging needs, and a new report says libraries have the potential to help.

At Monroe Community College, in Rochester, N.Y., for instance, the library is piloting a new, family-friendly study-room program for its 2,676 students who are also parents.

“We already see students who are parents or guardians bringing children into the library, and studying or using our other resources while they’re also attempting to watch and entertain their children,” said Katie Ghidiu, the college’s director of library services. “We can see that providing a dedicated space for them with age-appropriate and educational toys, games, and activities would support those who are already coming.”

The study rooms are not day-care facilities. Parents are responsible for watching their kids, but housing the space in the library creates an opportunity to connect and provide them with information about how to find additional services and support.

But balancing the responsibilities of college and family life isn’t just a problem at Monroe Community College; it’s a concern of 55 percent of community-college students. That’s according to a survey released on Monday of 10,844 students across seven community colleges, including Monroe.

Students also identified difficulty coming up with enough money for housing, food, clothing, transportation, and tuition as a major barrier to scholastic achievement. Those roadblocks disproportionately affect African American and Hispanic students as well as those eligible for Pell Grants. But securing the resources to meet those needs can present big barriers to academic success for all community-college students. Over half of the respondents to the survey identified themselves as first-generation college students; 75 percent said they worked while attending college.

Institutions often look at graduation, transfer, and job-placement rates to gauge success, said Christine Wolff-Eisenberg, manager of surveys and research at the nonprofit group Ithaka S+R and a co-author of a report on the survey’s findings. She said the group wanted to better understand how students themselves characterize success.

“What we saw was students equally valued their learning and mastery, and their being able to grow as people through the educational process,” Wolff-Eisenberg said.

Nearly 60 percent marked gaining knowledge of a subject or major at the top of their list, according to the report. One of the 37 students interviewed for the report put it this way: “I mean, yeah, the degree is cool, but I’m more about the knowledge.” Making more money and nailing down a new career closely followed as other top priorities.

With that understanding in place, the researchers developed prototypes — like child-care options, long-term technology loans, and personal librarians — that could meet the demand. Although the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, an independent federal agency, partly funded the report, Wolff-Eisenberg said researchers took several steps to account for bias in favor of libraries as preferred facilitators of student support. “We did not mention the library in any of our invitation messages to students to participate in the study,” she said.

Nonetheless, Wolff-Eisenberg said, “students really highly rated the library for all of these new services that otherwise administrators might not associate with the library,” such as a setting to find a social worker, locate other on-campus services, or find child care.

The Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York, was another institution surveyed for the report. It is piloting a concept called the personal librarian, which targets freshmen with lower-than-average high-school grades. “Students are often lost in the bureaucracy that is our institution because we are so large — we have over 26,000 students, over 1,500 faculty — and there are many offices that are very unfamiliar,” Jean Amaral, an associate professor at the library, said in an interview with The Chronicle.

“But with a personal-librarian program, we can connect them with one individual who can make sure they are connecting with the people they need around these noncurricular needs,” Amaral said. Those needs could include academic advising, locating the campus food pantry, and meeting the social worker who runs it.

“We’re not trying to turn people who are professional librarians and information professionals into social-work professionals — far from it,” said Braddlee, a co-author of the report and dean of learning and technology resources at Northern Virginia Community College. “We’re trying to use the role of the library as the largest informal academic space on the campus to help connect students to things that they might otherwise not be aware of that are available to them.”

But realizing those goals for students “with some of the highest need” could be a challenge, Braddlee said, especially at community colleges, which “have fewer dollars per student than any sector of higher education.”

Kathryn Palmer is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @kathrynbpalmer, or email her at kathryn.palmer@chronicle.com.