New from Primary Research Group: The Survey of American College Students: Who Goes to the College Library and Why
This info comes from a fee-based report. However, the highlights below are available for free.
From the Summary (via e-mail):
This report presents approximately 165 tables of data exploring how often full time college students in the United States go to their college library, what they do when they are there, and how they rate their library’s accessibility and comfort.
The data in the report is based on a representative sample of more than 400 full time college students in the United States. Data is broken out by 16 criteria including gender, grade point average, major field of study, income level of students and type, size of college, and mean SAT acceptance score
of colleges, among other variables.
Just a few of the report’s many conclusions are that:
+ Business and economics students reported the highest rates of taking library instruction courses; 12.27% of them had take such a class within the past month
+ Students from families with annual incomes of greater than $150,000 were somewhat more likely to have used the library than others.
+ The higher a student’s grades the more likely was that student to have visited the library within the past month.
+ More than 69% of private college students visited the library in the past month while only 56.66% of public college students did so.
+ Approximately twice as many females (9.34%) as males (4.73%) report taking a library instruction class within the past year.
+ Close to 55% of the students in the sample have used a public computer workstation at their college library within the past month.
+ Only 43.9% of students raised in families with annual incomes of greater than $150,000 have used a library workstation within the past month while 55.7% of students raised in families with incomes of less than $40,000 and 57.03% of students from families with incomes of between $40,000 and $75,000 have used a library workstation within the past month.
+ Close to 47% of students raised in major cities have held meetings with other students in the library within the past month; only 27.3% of students raised in suburbs have done so.
+ 8.71% of the students in the sample say that they virtually never go to the library and don’t really like being there.
+ We asked the students in the sample whether they use the library more often, less often, or about the same as their fellow students at their college. Only 37.72% felt that they used the library about the same extent as most other students.
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