Good morning, and welcome to Wednesday, November 15. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: rick.seltzer@chronicle.com.
Student life needs a shot in the arm
Concerned administrators are drawing up plans to rejuvenate campus clubs that have shriveled and disappeared in the last few years. Our Erin Gretzinger and Maggie Hicks report on one such effort experiencing early payoffs.
Student organizations are struggling to rebound from the pandemic. Some college students forgot how to engage outside of the classroom. Others never learned after following a stripped-down Covid schedule: attend class, eat, go home.
Clubs lost members and institutional knowledge needed to keep organizations running. Students missed the chance to watch, firsthand, as upperclassmen applied for funding, reserved rooms for meetings, and did the other organizational work needed to keep things running. As any good organizer will tell you, it’s these fundamentals that matter for smooth operation.
Numbers tell the story.
- 50 student organizations were operating at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise before the pandemic.
- 20 were left last fall.
Learned disengagement: That’s the term Gail Zimmerman, vice chancellor for student affairs, adopted to describe habits students fell into when they spent most of their time on screens at the height of the pandemic. So how do you teach them engagement?
- “How do you break a habit?” Zimmerman asked. “The easiest way is to replace it with something. So that’s what we had to create.”
The seeds of change aren’t free. UVA-Wise is spending almost $250,000 toward staffing, restructuring, and new funding for programs. Another $300,000 went toward an outdoor recreation court and gaming hub.
Enter Molly Land, “vibrant campus community coordinator.” Her job is to revive dormant clubs and help students start new ones. She helps groups with paperwork, recruiting, connecting with professors, reaching out to local residents, organizing events, and all the other little things that don’t turn out to be so little, like sending calendar invites.
Technology and gamification are part of the equation, too. UVA-Wise pays for a student-engagement app that aggregates different parts of student life, like club meetings, university events, and even student-government elections. Students can earn points by attending events or assuming leadership roles. Like the arcade tickets of yore, those points can be spent at a swag shop.
It’s working, at least according to early results.
- 56 approved student organizations were at UVA-Wise this month.
The bigger picture: Don’t write off these efforts as distractions. Extracurricular activities are key parts of the traditional college experience that break down isolation, promote student engagement, and can raise recent graduates’ value in the job market.
Read the full story here.