Re: Percentage of students using writing centers

[anne mullin <mullanne@isu.edu>]

At ISU -- a comprehensive public university of about 12,000 actual
students -- we also serve just about 10%.  The figures run about 10% for
students enrolled in composition classes in any given semester, also --
maybe a little bit higher.  Interestingly, we found out last fall in a
small sampling of freshman comp classes at semester's end, that the
overwhelming reason students gave for NOT having been to the Writing Lab
was "no time."  This makes sense to me, considering that almost all our
students have families and jobs -- but I'm changing the pitch somewhat
in visiting classrooms -- to suggest that an efficient, focused couple
of sessions in the Lab may be a much more efficient use of their
valuable time =-- Sara is right on, though, that numbers of users should
not be the main driving measure of our writing centers' worth.