A student engagement survey shows that while the majority of students are back participating in co-curricular activities, COVID is still a concern amongst many.
Richard Raridon from The Universities Service, Leadership, and Community Engagement office (SLCE) presented their report of a ‘Student Engagement Survey’ administered last semester to ASUW.
“We were discussing in a meeting last semester, you know, what are people seeing engagement wise? Is it down for everyone?” Raridon said as to the reason they conducted the survey. “How can we get students back engaged?”
The survey was sent out to all students via email on December 1, 2021.
“We had over 1300 responses, which is huge.” Raridon said. However, “Just over a third of students indicated that COVID concerns have impacted what they’re participating in.”
75% (1001 responses) of respondents said they actively participated or attended UW programs and events.
Student Organizations (SO) and athletic activities were the most frequented events in the survey. Other commonly attended events included performing arts, religious organizations, and club sports.
“It was a way to maybe help us plan some programs that are more in line with what people want to see or what people want to attend,” Raridon said. “Or, how do we tweak the things we’ve already planned to make people more comfortable coming.”
The survey asked those students who answered they did not attend extracurricular events (309 students) why they chose not to. The most common answer was that they were ‘too busy’ (44%).
“We also know COVID is still an issue and that it is something that is still preventing some engagement of a lot of our students,” Raridon said.
20% cited concerns about COVID or policies. Six participants said it was their dislike of University policy. 24 responses mentioned a lack of masking, vaccination, and enforcement of policies.
The most common response for what could be done to address the concern was ‘enforce mask requirements’.
Other than questions about participation, the survey wanted to know how students find out about events.
“We were also curious about ‘how are people hearing about things.’ Because we know that landscape has changed a lot in the last couple of years here,” Raridon said.
Word of mouth and social media were the most common ways students said they were hearing about events. This is a shift from where students used to get information from.
“What we would consistently see is that posters were number one.” Raridon said of past surveys.
In an effort to get feedback on how students would like to get additional information, Raridon said he saw unexpected feedback.
“A surprise to me, and to a lot of other staff I’ve talked to this about, is that students said very frequently ‘I want more emails’.”
At the end of the survey students were allowed to recommend events they’d like to see on campus. More concerts (especially at Prexy’s pasture) and events offering free food were among the most common answers.
