New Study Suggests Commuter Students Have Unique Civic Strengths

Commuter students can play a key role in getting to 100% voting for students (and everyone else too). Higher education needs to recognize their unique civic strengths.

This post is the second in a State of the Student Vote series about the research results from the projects supported by the first round of Student Vote Research Network subgrants. You can read the prior posts here.

“Woah. I wish I could let them know, ‘hey, I could help you guys.’”

-Commuter Student in Detroit

Commuter students have unique civic strengths. Here is what colleges and universities should do to engage them.

Our research at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and Henry Ford College grew out of a desire to understand student experiences both as learners and as community members, as well as a hope for different forms of reciprocity between campuses and their communities.

We found that commuter students often have unique civic strengths as a result of their experiences as community members and care givers. We recommend colleges and universities take the following steps to fully engage these strengths in their efforts to reach 100% voting for both their students and the surrounding community.

1. Target outreach based on student home address: Reach out to students and alumni based on their geographic affiliations whenever programming would benefit from community involvement. This is especially relevant for sharing voter information – including polling location, election office requirements, and information for analyzing local candidates and issues. Some students are likely already involved in campaigns or working the polls.

2. Learn about students’ civic lives: Collect information about students’ existing community engagement activities, as well as the issues that concern them. Work collaboratively with students to connect campus and community networks in ways that support learning and empowerment. 

3. Explicitly invite students to bring family and friends to campus: Siblings, younger cousins, friends in neighboring schools, and children are present in many students’ lives. Think of voter education and outreach not only in terms of the enrollee but the people they influence and support. These are also current and future voters who could visit a sample polling booth on campus or attend a community election forum. Research from Team Michelson and the Ask Every Student initiative in 2021 suggested students at minority serving institutions are particularly likely to mobilize family members as a result of student voter education efforts at their colleges.

These recommendations are based on emerging population level data about American commuter students and insights from our focus groups with commuter students in Michigan this year.

Most students are commuters. Almost a third are caregivers.

A majority of American undergraduates are commuters and almost a third are older than 25. More pressing for student success, almost a third of all college students are caregivers to children or adults.

Existing research on the academic experiences of commuter students has drawn attention to the time and energy pressures these students navigate in their daily lives. Without an appreciation of their community networks, students’ non-academic commitments may be misunderstood as deficits, detracting from higher education. Commuter students make choices in trading-off between commitments to family, schoolwork, employment, and any related civic engagement. Campus efforts to encourage civic action are in competition for student time. Our project sought to better understand how commuter students think about civic engagement and explore strategies for doing civic education in a way that complements these students’ commitments outside of college and engages commuter students’ unique civic strengths.

The guiding questions of this exploratory project include:

• How do commuter students think about, access, and manage civic engagement in relation to their existing community relationships and responsibilities?

• How do group identities intersect with these challenges and opportunities?

• How can/should colleges encourage civic engagement while relating to students as neighbors as well as learners?

We convened focus groups of commuter students to better understand their experiences with civic engagement.

We developed a conversational focus group methodology to hear from current commuter students about their experiences. The focus groups included discussion of their family and community activities and responsibilities, as well as any potential connections or distinctions students make between these activities and their navigation of time and energy for community involvement on and off campus.

In addition to a signed consent form, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire in advance of their focus group to gather demographic information and learn more about their community involvement, voting history, membership in campus organizations and other political activity. Our approach in the focus groups was to ask students first about their family and community involvement and then ask about campus and political involvement. The idea was not to learn about family contexts in depth but rather to have students center their own life experiences before talking about their civic engagement in relation to their daily lived experiences.

So far we have held a total of seven focus groups including 22 students from April to June 2023, with diverse representation in terms of race and ethnicity, college progress, incarceration experience, and socioeconomic status.

Commuter students bring valuable family and community experiences to their civic work.

Consistent with previous research, our participants described lives of juggling: managing schoolwork, employment, family, and their corresponding transportation-time calculations. All their activities that could be considered extraneous have to be reconciled in relation to core responsibilities (class and study time, family duties, paid employment, and for some, other connections core to their social identities, sense of fulfillment and social contribution). Given those pressures, it’s notable that when asked, half the participants mentioned active membership or volunteer activities in a range of associations, most of which overlap with one of the core responsibilities listed above.

On the pre-focus group questionnaire, half of the students listed specific community organizations and associations in which they were involved in the past year, ranging from 1-3 organizations. 23 distinct organizations were mentioned overall. Several students mentioned groups or activities in the focus groups that they had not included on the questionnaire. 

This chart represents the types of community organizations in which the participants are engaged:

While these data are not representative of the student body as a whole, the chart shows a variety of existing community networks in which students are actively engaged – apart from or overlapping with campus activities. And each category can itself include a range of activities and connections.

For example, regarding public schools: One college student with small children is involved in the PTA; another continues in his high school choir. And a third is connected through her family:

“My parents own a transportation company and they’re contracted through school districts to drive homeless kids or special needs kids. So I think that’s definitely like a community thing. I mean it’s my job but I’d also say it’s community, because the school is funding it. … There’s people who work for the school district who we’ve known since we started doing this. Plus these are the schools I went to and my siblings went to.”

The “criminal justice advocacy” category includes Chance for Life, a mentoring and support organization that operates within Michigan prisons. One student became a member while incarcerated and continues to be an active participant. Other justice-impacted students mentioned Safe and Just Michigan, NationOutside and Michigan Liberation, which focus on policy advocacy and activism for criminal justice reform.

Civic education for commuter students needs to account for economic need and caregiving responsibilities.

Out of 22 questionnaires, almost half of respondents (10) said they or their family would not be able to handle an unanticipated $500 expense; 7 said they have not purchased textbooks or other course materials due to cost. Only 5 said they did not have any of the listed financial pressures.

There are real time-energy tradeoffs for commuter students to engage civically in the context of family and cost pressures. This will be true for any higher education endeavor and the benefit of exposure to new experiences, ideas and contexts cannot be overstated. For commuter students with family responsibilities, however, any tradeoff in time and location is felt acutely and can be an actual personal loss – especially for students who are parents or who have other caretaking responsibilities. To the extent that universities can assist in linking students to civic engagement activities that are most meaningful or useful for them, they can meet the goals of developing citizenship skills without undermining (or minimally disrupting) the aspects of family and social life that are necessary for a particular student’s ability to stay in higher education.

Students living with family should feel they are welcome - but not required - to bring family members to campus.

14 of our respondents currently live with relatives. Participants were asked whether they would like more opportunities to bring their family members to campus for public events, or if they would rather keep the college and family aspects of their life separate. In the two focus groups with the most nontraditional students, there was clear enthusiasm about inviting family members and close friends to campus. One parent said her kids

“chomp at the bit to come to campus … They think it is the coolest.”

Another described,

“I brought my mom to the honors convocation, and she loved every second of it … I’m a first gen student too, so she’s really enjoying seeing me come here and be successful. She would come here at any chance she got.” 

Several students noted that they typically do not think of campus activities as open to family or friends (excepting graduation or similar recognition), despite the posting of events as “open to the community.” Referring to a special event for nontraditional students, one reflected:

“I didn’t invite anybody originally, but when I did speak with my family, they were like, ‘Why didn’t you let us know? We would’ve come.’ … even though I don’t have that many people to bring, it turns out my aunt and cousins would’ve wanted to show up” .

Another student explained that because few people in his family have been to college, he welcomes the opportunity and views bringing them to campus as a chance to “demystify it.”

Conversely, two traditionally-aged students sought to preserve the sense of independence and open discussion they enjoy on campus. One said they wanted to avoid political debates with family members and they view college as a place where students can

“get together and communicate with each other rather than have their families standing next to them.”

Another agreed that they didn’t share the same political leanings as their parents:

“besides the age, I grew up here, and I just grew up with way more diversity than them.” 

Given these diverse experiences, efforts to engage students on or off campus should assume that students have a range of family and community dynamics – some of which will be supportive of their chosen individual paths and some will not. Campuses could develop events and engagement opportunities that make family or other community member involvement more possible for those who would benefit from that support and not required for those who would not.

“I could help you guys.” Commuter students can help their universities connect to the community in a more authentic way.

Finally, in focus groups commuter students expressed broad interest in knowing about university projects and activities in their neighborhoods, and would like the option to participate – or even shape – projects relevant to their immediate communities. For example, a student who recently learned about a university initiative in Detroit shared:

“I live in Dearborn Heights, but I’m from Detroit. For the events that you have in Detroit, I would definitely wanna be a part. In fact, I wish they would contact me first. … ​I just felt like, ‘Woah. I wish I could let them know, hey, I could help you guys.’”

The Upshot? Commuter students are community members and leaders.

Commuter students are a university’s most direct community connection, and many have pre-existing, engaged networks relevant to campus programming and learning goals. Since people often participate in politics through local organizations (political or not), understanding students’ organizational connections will help universities support student voting and create the potential for more reciprocal community-university partnerships. This requires gathering information on students’ existing organizational affiliations and making outreach and partnership efforts in collaboration with the student/resident – if they choose to participate. Our focus group conversations suggest that they are more likely to participate if engagement opportunities reflect their lived realities and responsibilities.

Commuter students possess unique civic strengths and capacities. Supporting colleges and universities in recognizing and engaging the unique civic strength of commuter students is critical to the success of the movement for 100% student voting.

Lara Rusch is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.