Editor’s Note: This is a guest commentary. The opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board.
Ithaca College needs to update its clubs and organizations on Engage. Participation in clubs and organizations while in college leads to a more successful post-graduate career, yet, it is getting increasingly difficult to find clubs to participate in at the college. Club offerings are a significant determining factor in why incoming students choose the schools they attend. There is nothing more frustrating than finding out the club you were excited about when applying to schools does not exist.
At the college, students have a couple of ways to discover clubs and organizations. First, the school hosts two organization fairs each year at the beginning of each semester. There, students can get information from active club officers and members about the organization as well as get a glimpse into what the organization does.
The second option is the Engage page. Students can use the college’s Engage page to view a list of all the different clubs and organizations on campus. The club’s Engage page also offers important contact information for students to find and reach out to the club’s officers. Here is where the problem starts. When looking at the offerings, students will quickly find that the database is out of date.
The “Discover” organizations tab boasts a staggering list of over 300 opportunities at the college. In reality, the list of currently active organizations is much shorter. Some organizations list club contacts who are no longer students at the school, like the Ithaca College Swing Dance Club, whose club president finished their undergraduate program at the college in 2021 and received their masters degree in 2022. Other organizations show no contacts at all, like the old Ithaca College Car Club. This means that there is no way to get in contact with those clubs to see if they are active. Other clubs show their most recent events occurring two years ago or longer with no updates to the Engage page, hinting that the club has died out.
Clubs and organizations provide an essential framework for a student’s success throughout higher education for many reasons. Not only do students have an opportunity to learn more about themselves and others, benefiting their college experience, but students also get the opportunities to network and build their resume with extracurricular projects, experiences and leadership roles. An Ohio State University involvement study found that “college student involvement is positively related to academic performance, cognitive development, well-being, leadership and multicultural awareness.” These opportunities are fun and chosen by the individual student, which makes them highly desirable and extremely beneficial to students.
Prior to coming up with a solution to this problem, it is important to identify why the lack of up-to-date clubs and organizations may have occurred in the first place. There are a few contributing factors. One big possibility is the effect COVID-19 had on college life. With students experiencing college from an at-home environment, it made it very difficult for clubs to exist and be successful. Additionally, an isolated return to campus made it difficult to bring students of different majors, classes and living locations together for fear of spreading the virus around the school. When asking students what club activity looked like during the peak of COVID-19, one student stated that the only club activities that occurred were “off the book and unofficial” because of the restrictions the school placed on meetings. This led to almost all clubs being temporarily inactive and once the students graduated, many just died off.
Another contributing factor is that students graduate every year. For club officers to be active students, these clubs need to be on top of their game with recruitment and finding replacement members. This puts the responsibility on the club officers and president to have annual re-elections and to keep track of what officers will be graduating. The problem with this is that there is no real way for the school to enforce these re-elections other than having clubs go through the annual re-recognition process, but even after this, Engage still shows inactive clubs on their page.
Moving forward, better regulation of the active clubs and organizations would allow Engage to be an up-to-date place where prospective and current students can see what the college has to offer. This could be a great position for a student employee through the college’s Office of Student Engagement. Their role would be to monitor the groups on Engage and use the club re-recognition surveys to keep the page updated. It is time that Ithaca College updates the accuracy of the clubs and organizations on Engage.
Parker Friedman (he/him) is a junior advertising, public relations and marketing communications major. Contact him at [email protected].
