This Week in Student Success: Misunderstanding choice by Glenda Morgan
View full article here and excerpts below
A while back, I wrote about a Tyton Partners report that seemed to point to a fairly straightforward problem: a mismatch between the kinds of support institutions provide and the kinds of support students say they want. The implicit story was that students weren’t using services because they didn’t know about them, couldn’t access them easily, or didn’t see how they were relevant.
A more recent report from Tyton Partners complicates that story.
Its updated visualizations again show large gaps between institutional availability, student awareness, and actual use of support services. On the surface, this looks like a familiar problem: institutions build services, advertise them imperfectly, and students fail to take advantage of them.
… But when you look more closely at why students say they don’t use available supports, a different pattern emerges.
The top three reasons students give have nothing to do with logistics. They are:
- “I want to do things on my own.”
- “Support is not for students like me.”
- “I doubt it will be helpful.”
Taken together, these point to something much deeper than a communication problem. They suggest a lack of trust in the support itself.
In other words, this is not primarily a visibility problem. It is a legitimacy problem. Support that lacks legitimacy becomes invisible, no matter how visible it is.
Many students do not experience institutional support as something designed for people like them, in situations like theirs, and at moments when they actually need it. Instead, support is often perceived as remedial, stigmatizing, bureaucratic, or disconnected from real academic and personal challenges. For some students, using support feels like admitting failure. For others, it feels like entering a system that does not understand them.
This helps explain why awareness alone does not translate into use.
If students do not believe support will help them, will respect them, or will understand their circumstances, they will not use it, no matter how well funded or widely advertised it is. Addressing that gap requires more than better marketing. It requires rethinking how support is designed, delivered, and embedded in students’ everyday academic lives.
One of the most important influences on Bowdoin students use of services like the BCLT are recommendations from a professor. We invite you to use the slide linked below on Canvas or in a class presentation so students are aware and consider using the resources available to support their growth as writers, problem-solvers, and learners.