How to Get Students to Use Resources

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Students return to campus soon (if they’re not there already), and many will be ready for a fresh start. It’s a new year and a new opportunity to make the most of their college experience. At Persistence Plus, when we ask students about spring goals, they often say they want to stay on top of responsibilities, graduate, find an internship or post-graduation job, and earn a 4.0.

Yet the campus resources that help students fulfill those goals are severely underutilized. According to a recent survey by Tyton Partners of more than 2,000 college students nationwide, barely half had used academic advising, with only around a fifth taking advantage of tutoring, financial aid counseling, career advising, or mental health counseling. This is a big problem, as several studies indicate that underutilizing these resources can negatively impact students' performance, persistence, and likelihood of graduating.

These findings leave us with two burning questions: Why don’t more students use these services? And how can we change that?

The Tyton survey highlights a key barrier to students’ use of resources: awareness. Despite colleges’ best efforts, many students don’t realize all the help available to them for academic, financial, and personal challenges. Moreover, the survey results suggest a link between students’ awareness of resources and their sense of belonging, a key factor in retention. Together, these findings point to social norms messaging as an effective means for increasing students’ utilization of resources.

Awareness

I work with a community college that evaluates each student’s learning needs and then does targeted outreach to those eligible for accessibility services like a note-taker or extra exam time. Yet most students do not take advantage of this aid. The college, therefore, asked us to design messaging that would increase students' uptake of these services, but I wasn't sure why they weren't using them. When we posed this question to students on our platform, nearly 80 percent had no idea that accessibility services existed.

Most colleges do yeoman’s work to advertise the many support services on campus via email, social media, print advertising, and direct outreach (e.g., orientation, advisor meetings, classroom visits). Yet awareness remains a huge problem. According to Tyton, a third to half of all students don't know about resources like academic advising (35 percent) and career advising (46 percent). At community colleges, awareness can be up to 50 percent lower compared to four-year colleges. Unsurprisingly to us, Tyton found 81 percent of community college students were unaware of accessibility services.

Social Belonging

Tinto’s seminal theory on college retention posits that students persist when they feel academically and socially integrated on campus. As I’ve written here, feeling like one belongs at college is hugely important for success. Tyton, therefore, examined whether students’ awareness and utilization of campus resources relate to their sense of belonging on campus.

Yes and yes: Students who strongly agreed that they belonged at their college were aware of and utilized more campus resources. These correlations can’t tell us about causation: Do resources make a student feel more integrated, or do those who feel integrated seek out more resources? Without a controlled experiment, we can’t know for sure, but the association inspires an idea to increase both students’ awareness and utilization of campus resources: leveraging social norms.

Social Norms

Of the many strategies we could employ to nudge students toward resources, social norms may be particularly advantageous. Norms are typically used to drive behavior change, but they could raise awareness, especially among college students highly sensitive to social cues. Messages that associate resources with integrating academically and socially may be more likely than traditional advertising to break through the noise and stick in students’ memory. This social information could reshape how students see themselves and their place on campus, thus influencing their sense of belonging.

But will social norms change help-seeking behavior? Norming is most effective when the desired behavior is ambiguous, hidden, or stigmatized. Utilizing campus resources often checks all three boxes. Tutoring, for example, can be…

• Ambiguous: Students don’t know which and how many other students go to tutoring.
• Hidden: It usually occurs in a closed office in a separate building from classrooms.
• Stigmatized: Students question whether going to tutoring means they’re dumb.

Normalizing tutoring, therefore, removes several barriers to uptake. Our team's use of norming has increased tutoring use by up to five times across multiple contexts. We’ve also seen norms increase use of financial resources like the food pantry and emergency aid.

Conclusion

Many college students remain largely unaware of the resources available to help them achieve their goals. This awareness gap may harm students’ sense of belonging by letting them think the college doesn’t care about them, a definite red flag for eventual withdrawal. Social norms messaging may be a perfect solution for increasing awareness, removing barriers, and tying use of these resources to academic and social integration.