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Sophomore Nikki Rydel lives in Oakdale and said she sometimes regrets not living on campus.

“Friends will invite [me] to do something and I’ll be tired and know I’ll have to drive home later,” she said.

Parking also presents a problem for Rydel. She has a permit but rarely finds a spot.

“I once got two parking tickets in one week,” she said, because she was late for class and parked illegally.
“I had to park somewhere.”

Both Rydel and Infinity said that commuter students are guaranteed a more difficult experience; still, they agreed that certain resources would make things easier. Like reserved commuter parking, for instance.
And a better commuter lounge, they said, one not in a tiny, dusty room, with ugly, uncomfortable couches, where commuters try to eat, watch television and study in the same cramped space.

Building community through resources

“How do you make commuter students feel like part of the community when they don’t live here?” asked
Wendy Burns, the assistant director of student activities and leadership development. Adequate resources are the answer, she said, which can help students feel connected by getting them involved on campus.

Hamline has a commuter lounge and other available resources (see sidebar), but has no full-time staff responsible for handling commuter needs. The responsibility falls on Burns and Kelly Krebs, director of student activities and leadership development.

Burns has a yearly budget for providing commuter amenities, but she said it doesn’t go far. “Basically, it covers the coffee,” she said.

Other ACTC schools have similar resources, though St. Thomas stands out. The university has a commuter center, staffed by one full-time coordinator and a handful of part-time positions. They occasionally offer free legal and tax advice, as well as healthy eating workshops and theme days where food is provided. They also manage a website with information on off-campus housing and other services.

Sickbert, who formerly served as dean of students at St. Thomas, said there was more commitment toward commuter services than Hamline currently has, but added that “as far as effectiveness, I don’t know if what [St. Thomas does] is any greater than what we do here.”

Hamline had a commuter-student advocacy organization named CARS (Commuters Are Real Students), but lack of interest ago caused the group to dissolve four years ago. Burns would like to see the group resurrected, saying that she would serve as the adviser.

Burns, Krebs and Sickbert all agreed that the ideal commuter resource, however, is a new student center.

“It would bring all students together and facilitate community between on-campus and commuter students,” Burns said.

But there isn’t a location on campus, including the current student center, serving such a need, Krebs said.

“As a student, if I want to go where students are hanging out, where would I go? The library, I suppose.
There isn’t a place where [students] know [they’ll] see people.”

Said Sickbert: “What a student center looks like often speaks to commuter students more than anything else.”

Plans for a new student center aren’t in the near future, however, and Erika Lade and Jordan Macknick, the two HUSC commuter representatives, said in a joint e-mail that they’re instead pushing for smaller changes.

The commuter lounge needs work, they said. They’ve discussed moving it to the Learning Center faculty lounge. And it would be nice for commuter students to have reserved parking spots, they said.

“It is a little unfair that those on campus who never drive their cars leave their cars in the best spots in the parking lot,” they said in the e-mail.

Different groups, different needs

The term “commuter student” is complex. There are two basic types of commuter students: those who live nearby (a walk or short drive away), and those who spend a considerable amount of time each day (45 minutes or more) driving or busing back and forth from home.

Associate Dean of Students Alan Sickbert said he would like to differentiate between the two groups because the two groups have different needs, and most students who live nearby don’t define themselves as commuters.

Burns agreed, saying, “We have people who rent houses across Snelling, and we have people who commute from Wisconsin.”

Students who lived on campus before moving off have a “deliberate introduction to services on campus,”
Sickbert said, adding that they make social connections and learn about campus procedures while in the dorms.

Senior Cassidy Dobson, who lived on campus her first year, fits Sickbert’s analysis. She made friends her first year and became involved with campus organizations. She’s more detached from the Hamline community now, but she has few complaints.

“I’m a science major; I’m secluded from campus, anyway,” Dobson said.

She admitted to not knowing where the commuter lounge is, but said she doesn’t have a need for it. And parking isn’t a big deal, she said.

Dobson lives in south Minneapolis and has an average one-way drive of 25 minutes. Instead of returning home multiple times daily, she fills her breaks with class research and exercise, tasks she said she would do whether she was closer to Hamline or home.

Benefits of commuter involvement

Commuters comprised 86 percent of college students nationwide from 1995ą96, according to a U.S.
Department of Education study.

Barbara Jacoby, director of the Office of Community Service-Learning at the University of Maryland, has published several articles on commuter students.

A main problem, she wrote in a 1999 piece, is that commuters are more likely to be less involved than on-campus students, and cited a 1984 study that found:

•Highly involved students devote considerable effort to studying, work at on-campus rather than off-campus jobs, participate actively in student activities, and interact frequently with faculty members and peers.

•Uninvolved students tend to not study enough, spend little time on campus, not be involved in student life, and have few contacts with faculty and fellow students.
Though some studies say retention rates of commuters are lower than those of on-campus students, official data are often unreliable, since most students attending urban universities such as Hamline eventually become commuters as they move off campus by junior or senior year.

The next step

Both Sickbert and Burns said they have started researching commuter behavior.

“It’s knowing the students and measuring who they are,” Sickbert said. “Do we have commuters that come back at night? Are they connected in some manner? Or do they go to class and go home?”

“The first step is identifying needs,” Burns said. “Then it’s a resource issue.”

“Are we a residential campus or are we a commuter campus?” she asked. “How [we] think about that is how [we] use our resources.”

So far the only planned activity for commuters is a spring dinner provided by the Hamline Entertainment and Activities Team (HEAT). They don’t have the budget to plan additional events, however.

No campus organization or office has current plans to provide commuters with additional resources, and Sickbert said the idea of hiring new staff is impractical.

Macknick and Lade said commuter students looking for community can find it; they just need to take a more active role.

“A stronger sense of community among commuter students could spring from more conversation or signs up in the commuter lounge. Otherwise, it’s more a matter of commuter students taking the initiative to seek out what’s going on.”