8
Split between School, Home, Work, and More
Commuting as a Status and a Way of Being
With Hilary Tackie and Elan Hope
The challenge of commuting is often much more than the physical distance between home and school. Many commuting students are moving between divergent social worlds. Their focus and energy are split between environments that abide by different norms and priorities, forcing them to shift their self- presentation throughout each day. This lack of coherence can make college more challenging than it is for students who reside on campus. Each day, commuting students leave their college environment, which can restrict their access to academic resources and support. In addition, students often decide to commute for financial reasons, necessitating paid employment to manage the financial burdens created by their college enrollment. Consequently, as several studies show, commuting students are at greater risk of dropping out or disconnecting from college.1
Nestor, a Mexican American commuting student who attended Urban PrivateU-South, described a divide between commuting and residential students. The students who lived in dorms knew one another, and the commuters knew the commuters. On his campus, there was not much intermingling. Asked whether commuting made him feel like an outsider, he said, “kinda, because you’ll see [people] hanging out, but it’s because they all dorm together. They all know each other from their dorm. But it’s like, oh, I’m a nobody. It’s not like I’m invisible, but there is that separation between commuters and people that dorm.”
This separation presents, at least for Nestor, an “us-versus-them” dichotomy in experiences, identification, and identity. Given that racial-ethnic minority students have the highest likelihood of commuting to campus, we would be remiss not to examine the experiences of students at the intersection of these two identifications.2 Commuting matters. Several of the students labeled themselves and qualified their experiences by stating, “I am a commuter.” Because this status affected their connections to campus and their approach to college life, understanding the first-year transition experiences of students who classify themselves as commuters is integral to illuminating the ways such young people make sense of who they are as college students.
As highlighted throughout this book, there is no single best way to be a successful student. Similarly, there are many different ways to be a successful commuting student. Among our larger sample of 533 students surveyed, slightly more than 60 percent of those who stated that they lived with their parents were Latinx. In addition, among the seventy students interviewed, those who highlighted their commuting experiences were almost exclusively Latinx. The experiences of Latinx students attempting to bridge the gulf between home and school that are detailed in chapters 9 and 10 illustrate the difficulties of bridging the many cultural disjunctures associated with living in an environment where family members do not understand the time and energy required for being a successful college student, particularly the cocurricular commitments, and especially when those commitments conflict with family obligations.
This chapter explores the first-year experiences of three Latinx students—Sammy, Kara, and Lucia. Besides being commuters, all three are first-generation students in immigrant families, and these identities add additional complexities in how they experience the transition to college. We show commuting as both an identification and identity through the experiences of students who range in their ability to successfully transition as commuting students—from experiencing their residential status as simply a factor of their reality to experiencing it as the central obstacle to fully becoming a college student.
Commuting Students Possess Many Overlapping Minority Statuses
The most recent examination, which was of a 2003 cohort of students enrolled in four-year colleges, found that 21 percent lived off campus, 67 percent lived on campus, and 12 percent lived at home—the group that we call commuting students in this chapter.3 Commuting students are more than simply students who cannot walk from their dorm or apartment to their classes. Often, these students are also likely to work more than twenty-five hours per week, are first-generation students, and are financially independent.
Sammy, who attended Urban StateU, was an excellent student in high school. Although he claims to have slept through several classes, he managed to maintain a 3.8 GPA and scored a 29 on the ACT. His high school served mostly other Latinx youth like him. Sammy’s parents immigrated to Chicago before his birth. His sister was the only other person in his immediate family to go to college. Despite working and living at home, Sammy was highly connected to his campus; he joined profession clubs and the rugby team, made many friends, and started dating a girl from his chemistry class. He believed that having to balance many competing responsibilities during his first year of college taught him “how to start living like a real adult instead of like a kid still stuck in high school.” After college, Sammy hoped to become both a neurologist and a teacher.
In contrast to the average college student, while growing up Sammy had to manage family and community insecurities stemming from undocumented immigration status, family and neighborhood poverty, and neighborhood violence. This meant that his college search was not only about his academic ability, but also his ability to pay for college.
Especially me being from the South Side, you know, we have a lot of Hispanics who are middle class, low class. Many are barely making it by, maybe they’re making it by but they’re struggling a bit, and they have to watch where they’re stepping. And especially immigration, like deportations, ICE. There’s so much more fear within us about college. Especially with our parents, they were like “Oh, he doesn’t have his papers, we don’t have the money for this, can he even go, should he even try?”
From the start of his application process, Sammy was fairly certain he would commute. He knew that it was highly unlikely that his family would be able to pay for dorm living, but cultural factors and his parents’ wishes also figured prominently in that decision. “I told my parents I want to experience how it is to live outside my house,” he said, “and they started putting me on a guilt trip like, ‘Oh you don’t like living with us? You don’t like it here?’ I’m just like ‘No, I want to experience it.’ You know, houses on campus, I could do what I wanted, I could basically just do what I want, but I wasn’t completely independent, as they [say].”
Research shows that Latinx students have one of the highest likelihoods of commuting to campus and experience substantial internal conflict, as well as conflict with family regarding the decision to live on campus.4 Despite the challenges associated with commuting, living at home enables first-generation, racial-ethnic minority and immigrant students to maintain family cultural connections, and it lessens the psychological and emotional distress of feeling that succeeding in college comes at the cost of weakening one’s family ties.5
Kara attended Urban PrivateU-South as a business major. Because she could not afford to live in a dorm, she had a ninety-minute train and bus ride to campus. Like Sammy, Kara had parents who expected her to live at home and viewed providing housing as part of their support for college. “My family,” she said, “was just like, ‘Oh, we’re not charging you for rent or anything.’ Cause that’s like in our culture.”
In addition to being a full-time college student, she worked full-time at a retail outlet less than ten minutes from home. Working full-time was the only way she could afford college. Because of these many demands on her time, she went to campus solely for the academics. She did not join any clubs or organizations. Because of this disconnection from campus, she entered her sophomore year feeling like she had yet to make a true transition to college.
Kara, for the most part, worked through the application and enrollment processes alone, as her parents had neither the experience to help her apply nor the finances to help her pay. She debated between a university that gave her a full-ride scholarship and Urban PrivateU-South, where she would have to pay a high cost for the opportunity to attend. Her parents told her it was up to her—go for free or pay. “But it was my dream, since I was little, to come to [Urban PrivateU-South] downtown,” she said. “And since it was like a really good business school,” she opted for the downtown campus. She also got “a better feel” from Urban PrivateU-South, she said.
Kara was the first woman but not the first person in her extended family to attend college. However, because her enrollment challenged the gendered cultural expectations of her Latinx immigrant family, she was not privileged to the valuable information held among the college-educated men in her extended family. “They saw it as a man thing to go to college … but not like completely like, ‘Oh don’t go to school,’ or like, ‘Get married ’cause you’re twenty already.’ ” (This gendered aspect of her college transition is detailed in chapter 9.) Advice from the college-educated men in her family might have been pivotal in helping her to understand the value of accepting that full ride from Urban StateU rather than the partial scholarship from a much more expensive private institution. To cover the out-of-pocket costs, Kara was forced to increase her shifts at work such that, by the start of the academic year, she was working full-time as well as attending school as a full-time student.
Lucia enrolled at Urban PrivateU-North with interests in medicine and the sciences. Lucia’s parents were both from Mexico and worked hard to support their children’s educational aspirations while struggling with poverty throughout Lucia’s childhood. Her parents’ hard work inspired Lucia to do well in school and instilled in her a hope that she would eventually go to college. She finished high school with a 4.0 GPA and scored a 27 on her ACT. Lucia’s older siblings had attended a local community college, so she grew up believing that community college or work were the only options available to her. “I didn’t think that I would be able to afford something like [four-year college]. And it’s just the topic, my parents would always talk about school, school, school, and that’s why they worked so hard, but they would never bring up any university or anything like that, so it just didn’t cross my mind.”
During high school, her counselor and her sister encouraged her to apply to college, which changed her aspirations. Despite this encouragement, Lucia, like Kara, received little informational or instrumental assistance from her family.
If I had questions I would maybe ask my sister, but she didn’t live with me because she’s already married. But it was just mostly me, ’cause my parents don’t speak—they’re divorced—and they don’t speak English, and they don’t know anything about it. It wasn’t difficult as much as it was a tedious process. I applied to a lot of colleges, so I just had to rewrite the same information, and sometimes I had to get a lot of my essays revised by teachers. I didn’t think it was difficult at all. It was just time-consuming process.
What Lucia did get from her parents was encouragement and motivation to make them proud.
We have always been struggling with money issues, mostly when I was younger. And I saw how hard they worked to give us [anything], …’cause the only reason we came over here was that so me and my siblings would be able to get an education… . And I saw how hard they worked to allow us to get an education, and that was really my main priority. I really, really like school. I’ve always really, really liked learning. I love learning new things, and I really want to be able to use my education to be able to help other people and to be successful, so I really wanted to end up going to college.
Getting accepted into Urban PrivateU-North was a long shot, she knew. She also assumed that college, especially a four-year institution, was not a financially viable option. To avoid any unnecessary expenses, she started out living at home in the suburbs, enduring an arduous commute to campus involving trains and buses.
Work, Finances, and Campus Engagement
Working to afford college was a central theme in commuting students’ narratives. Although nearly half of full-time students work more than twenty-five hours a week to afford school, this percentage is substantially higher for commuting students, who are also more likely to work off-campus and work longer hours, making it challenging to engage in campus life.6 Although commuting may have reduced their financial stress, the distance and travel time often served as additional stressors.
When Kara started college, she commuted to campus four days a week. By the spring quarter of her first year she had figured out ways to reduce the commute to two days a week by packing her courses into fewer days and taking classes online. Kara never spent time on campus that she did not absolutely have to. This meant she was rarely able to take advantage of campus-based academic supports. Referencing impromptu study sessions hosted by professors or teaching assistants, Kara complained,
I just don’t feel comfortable when they’re like, oh, they have specific times and they don’t want to make [other] time. Well, there’s only so much, I can’t go in at the specific time you ask. Especially ’cause of that distance barrier. So, it’s like, “Oh, we have a study session on Friday, you can come later.” It’s like, “Oh, well, I have to make that hour drive to come over here, that hour commute.” So it’s really not to my advantage to come.
Kara’s professors had little sympathy for her need to work full-time and did not understand that enrollment was contingent on working full-time to pay for it. A professor told Kara that she should not be working more than twenty hours while in school. “I’m like, ‘Well, there’s really not much I can do if I can’t pay for school,’ ” she said. Her situation also meant she had no time for extracurricular activities. “Soccer was the one thing I was really hoping to do, because I loved playing soccer,” she said. The need to work also kept her from applying for scholarship opportunities that would have helped her pay for college. “I know there’s a lot of scholarships available to Hispanics, and low-income and stuff. But it’s like, that whole work, yeah, is preventing me from that.”
Kara was stuck. Working enabled her to enroll in college while simultaneously impeding her ability to engage in college. Recognizing the importance of campus engagement, she considered taking an on-campus work-study position. But she quickly discarded that idea when she learned of the lower salary. “I really can’t make less, because I’ve already figured out how much it takes me to pay for [school]. If I do work a work-study job, I would have probably have to keep another part-time job.”
It’s important to note that lower campus engagement does not mean that commuting students are any less engaged during class or display less academic effort. Education researcher George Kuh and colleagues show that although residential students may display slightly higher scores on measures of engagement, commuting students, despite balancing multiple responsibilities, exert equal effort in the classroom.7
Lucia’s parents paid as much of her college costs as they could. Her mother, she said, paid more than half the year’s tuition, and her father gave her his unemployment checks; “that ended up being a lot of money, so I used it for that. It was always my plan that my parents were really gonna help me pay for it.” Lucia also worked a full-time job the summer before college and then part-time once school started, but she still did not have enough to live on campus.
Lucia relied heavily on a loan and a number of scholarships to afford an eventual move to campus. Several of those scholarships demanded her time to attend sponsored events, tutor students, and participate in mentoring meetings. A women’s leadership scholarship, for example, asked that she read the next cohort’s essays. “It’s about fourteen girls that get a $16,000 scholarship… . so I had to read through about four hundred applications with four differential essays, with recommendation letters and like a résumé. I had to read through about two hundred of them during the school year.” Another scholarship required her to mentor a student from a lower-income neighborhood. “They’re part of this afterschool program, and I went to go and tutor them. I had a specific student that I mentored. He was in middle school. And it was once a week … and then we also had separate meetings with all their tutors.” In addition, she was part of a mentoring program for “students of color and first-generation college students. They had events every month that I went to.”
Essentially, Lucia’s scholarships came with a tax on her time that was especially difficult to manage when working part-time and commuting to campus. This left her feeling very restricted, because she could only become minimally involved in clubs of her choosing. Again, doing the work necessary to obtain the financial resources to enroll in college limited her ability to engage in campus life.
Despite minimizing student debt, or simply making college possible for those with no access to student loans, commuting can quickly become untenable. It took Lucia nearly two hours to commute to campus on public transportation. It was “terrible,” she said. Before the end of her first term, it was clear that she was not going to be able to sustain it for the remainder of the year. “I was really close to transferring to a college closer to home. But then, I remember my sisters, they told me not to. They told me just to stick through.”
Following the receipt of some additional scholarship money, Lucia was able to move to campus at the start of her second semester. With more time, she joined several clubs and began to have the college experience she desired. “The transition from commuting to dorming was a great, great one. That was one of the best decisions I could’ve made. I don’t think I’ll ever commute again.”
As in Lucia’s case, the challenges of commuting and learning to balance many competing responsibilities can also be a growth experience, as long as the stress does not exceed one’s coping abilities.8 “I learned a lot about myself during this whole year of college, I learned, ’cause my first semester was hard ’cause I was working a part-time job and I was commuting and I was taking seventeen credit hours. It was hard, but I learned, like, life is always gonna be hard no matter what.”
Commuting, Working, Studying, and Playing
Despite a substantial financial aid package, Sammy struggled financially. He wanted to be able to buy what he wanted but was also committed to managing his financial aid wisely. To have more spending money and to be able to build up a savings account, he took a part-time job in a grocery store. “I’m gonna try to split [my paycheck] off into separate expenses. My first paycheck probably gonna be for books. Each paycheck after that is gonna be my living expense… . I don’t want to go into debt, since I don’t have to worry about my tuition; more for me it’s just paying to live. That’s basically why I work,” he said.
Sammy was also planning ahead for the possibility of taking more than four years and needing to pay the full amount of tuition. “That’s why I’m hoping to put a lot of money that I’m earning into savings accounts… . I have to be able to support myself. If I have to go the extra that I won’t be struggling, and I won’t be miserable, and I’ll be able to finish. And I said that I want to go to med school—that means I’m going to have to save even more money now, put ten dollars away from every check and start saving up.”
Although this is an admirable goal, putting ten dollars each week into a savings account will do little to reduce the student loan debt he will incur should he go to medical school. As So-Hyun Joo and colleagues note, students must establish a critical balance between not taking on an overwhelming amount of student debt and not working so many hours that they cannot meet their academic responsibilities.9 Failing to find this balance puts students at risk of dropping out.
Despite a full schedule, Sammy was able to become engaged in organizations for students interested in medicine and joined the rugby team. He felt confident about managing his time.
To be honest I didn’t really have a lot of trouble with managing my time. As I grew up I sort of tended to become more detail orientated, or I liked to believe so. So, you know, I would always carry a watch around, and I would time things. I would time how long it would take me to get to my train station. How long it would take the train to get there. Intervals between each train. Intervals between late trains, ’cause that happens way too often, and then how long it takes me to get to one location and then wait for a bus, how long that usually takes, then go to [Urban StateU]. So in that sense, I was sort of able to start mapping out my schedule in my head.
He would arrive on campus at 9 a.m. and leave at 5 p.m. During a three-hour gap, he scheduled time for friends and fun. “Within those three hours, I separated—maybe two hours were for friends and maybe an hour for myself to do whatever else I wanted to.”
Despite being involved and social, Sammy still felt somewhat set apart from residential students. Because he lived in a high-crime and high-violence neighborhood, he often had to cut short his social time on campus to avoid walking from the bus stop to his home late in the evening. On several occasions he relied on friends to let him stay in their dorm rooms. It was when facing these time constraints that Sammy, like Nestor earlier, felt like an outsider.
The one thing I sort of don’t really enjoy is how much—what’s the word—how selective do I have to be about the things I want to do? I come from the South Side—not the safest part of Chicago, not the most dangerous, but not the nicest place to be around ten or eleven at night. So I had to be sort of selective about the things I want to do. People who dorm or have apartments around [Urban StateU] are sort of more capable of going out, doing more of the events that [Urban StateU] might provide. Maybe they start at 8 [p.m.] and don’t end till like 10. I would promptly be there for an hour, and then I would leave, and that’s before like anything really starts. So I feel sort of left out at times, because you know people are doing all these things, and I sort of had to be at home and to sort of learn how to deal with it.
Despite these challenges, Sammy spent a great deal of time on campus and optimized his time there. He prioritized connecting to campus life and taking part in a variety of on-campus opportunities. As we discuss next, institutional supports helped Sammy have a successful college transition as a commuting student. Urban StateU has received the highest national award of excellence “for transforming higher education through outstanding programs, innovative services, and effective administration” for off-campus, commuter, and other nontraditional students.
A Space of Their Own on Campus
Commuting students have bounded opportunities to establish connections and build a sense of belonging on campus. Their time on campus is bounded by work hours, public transportation schedules, and other nonacademic obligations that create roadblocks to socializing and campus-based activities.10 Their lack of a place on campus puts them at a disadvantage in establishing the type of campus-based peer support networks that are important for smoothing the transition to college.11 Kara, Sammy, and Lucia found that they could no longer rely on their high school friends to get them through this life transition, as many of those friends either went away to different schools or did not attend college.
Lucia noted the importance of her new college friends in supporting her through the transition.
I learned a lot from my three really good [college] friends, and every time I hang out with them I learn something new, and it’s like they have kind of like the same goals … and expectations that I have for my future, so that really helps ’cause my friends back home they’re not, they don’t enjoy doing a lot of the same things that I, that we enjoy doing… . They like doing different things, and then not a lot of things are educational activities. [My friend] that lives on campus, she’s been a really, really good friend; she’s really supportive and everything, she always tells me to apply to different things, she tells me what’s going on, like scholarships or events that she knows I’m interested in, and that’s really helpful.
Lucia had initially bonded with other commuters on campus since “we were going through the same [orientation] process.” But she discounted those connections as not being as deep as the ones she made after being able to move into the dorm during the second term. This suggests the need to rethink orientation strategies that separate commuting and residential students into distinct orientation groups. Lucia’s shift from commuting to living in the dorms “was awesome” and helped her redefine what it meant to be a college student. “I had a lot of fun, I was able to join a lot more clubs, and I really like college, I really, really like learning, and I’m definitely going to keep going for it even after I’m done with my undergraduate education. I want to do an MD-PhD program.”
In contrast, Kara, who despite having an academically successful first year, never felt like she was fully becoming a college student. “I really haven’t had much of a college experience. My transition has been basically transitioning from working two days when I went to high school to now working a whole week. If I go to campus it’s just to go to class. I rarely stay on campus.” This resentment was exacerbated by the fact that her experience differed from that of most of her high school friends who moved away for college, and from her best friend who was living in a dorm at another college that was close to Kara’s. The majority of her friends were now living a college life that she could not relate to. “Most of them they don’t even work, from what I’ve heard. Because, oh, like they don’t want to work or stuff, or they think it’s too stressful, or their parents are paying for school. So they don’t feel that need to work.”
Kara described her first year of college as overwhelming and never once mentioned receiving any support in balancing her schedule, reviewing her finances, or socially integrating into campus. These were all responsibilities that required her initiative. When asked who helped her through stressful experiences, Kara replied, “Well, I don’t think I did receive much of help.”
Kara saw moving into a dorm as the only way to improve her college experience. “I really wish I could dorm [when I get to senior] year, because obviously then I’ll have, since I’ll have all my credits, then I’ll be able to get an internship downtown, maybe. But I don’t know, because of I’d have to get a good job and make sure I could afford to dorm, and to pay for school. I feel like that the whole paying for it is a huge barrier in whether I can actually have a college experience.” By the end of her first year, Kara still hadn’t “made, like, legit friends like I had in high school.” Not having any “legit friends” on campus, as well as having to justify her college goals to her family, made for a difficult college transition.
Sammy also recognized the role that living on campus played in connecting to a supportive peer group. He used his friendliness and outgoing personality to make those connections with classmates. “It was sort of something I had to figure out on my own,” he said. “Everyone had their own ideas of what to do, oh, ’cause you know some people are like, ‘Oh yeah, I got my cluster mates, I have my roommates, people on the same floor as me.’ I can’t have that kind of experience. But I can experience going to a class, I’ll sit next to someone, and I’ll be like, hey, you don’t understand it. They’ll be like, [and] there we go [a conversation started].” Sammy had friends in the dorms, and he leveraged his relationships with them to build a stronger connection to campus. “You know, I have some friends who lived on campus, I would go over here and sleep here. You know, maybe there’s a concert going on… . So I’d come over here, maybe I’d sleep here.”
While there were definitely social advantages to having access to the dorms, Sammy found ways to participate in campus activities without being a residential student: “It was sort of something I had to figure out on my own.” When asked about the most stressful part of first year, Sammy, who is admittedly precocious, said,
I guess sort of finding out where I belong. There’s all kinds of organizations, all kinds of choices, all kinds of people. Do I start hanging out like smokers, or with the people, like a small group of Mexicans, do I branch out, and if I branch out, will people accept me? There’s a lot more of a world for me whether or not I can find people who understand, who I can actually be happy with. But for me I like to talk a lot, obviously, I like to talk. So that was a little bit weird for me, ’cause I didn’t want my college life to be similar to my high school life, where I was just outside and alone. I just sort of wanted to try and be out.
Without the benefit of situational bonds formed through simply spending hour upon hour together via residential living, commuting students are limited to interest-based bonds.
Sammy’s institutional identity was helped significantly by Urban StateU’s focus on commuter student belonging. By giving commuting students a place of their own on campus, where they could store things, relax, and commune with each other, the school at least afforded commuters the luxury of passively building campus connections. Sammy made many of his friends at the campus’s commuter center.
It’s basically a place you can study and just relax. It’s hard being a commuter sometimes. You dorm here, you could leave half your shit in your room and then come back out and then come back in and grab whatever you want. For us we have to carry everything. I go to work now, and I have to carry my uniform on me for [work]. So it’s either carry around my uniform with me everywhere I go, or have it on me the entire day. Button-down shirt, a tie, black pants, black shoes—you know I’m not going to feel all too comfortable in it. What the commuter center does [is] they give you lockers, they give you access to a kitchen, they give you access to computers, and if you just like an area to sit and chill and you meet other people that you’ll get to know and someone has your charger, same kind of phone, and then you ask them for a charger. They’ll have game days and snacks, movie days. Most people only go in there for like the lemonade and cookies, though. But, yeah, it’s a nice thing going on there.
As Sammy’s experiences illustrate, such spaces and the targeted services they provide, such as lockers, not only connect but validate commuters as valued members of the campus community.
All students need a campus home, and Urban PrivateU-South also recognized the need to create focused services for commuting students. However, the programs and services offered there were much less a priority and much less robust than at Urban StateU. Lucia thought the services were understaffed and largely unhelpful, and instead found her campus home in offices directed to racial- ethnic minority students.
Students’ level of integration into the academic and social life of college is measured by the strength of the connections they have with other members of the campus community, including fellow students and professors.12 These connections help them develop a sense of institutional belonging and are informal sources of cultural, informational, and instrumental capital about how to navigate college. Consequently, students like Kara, who are only loosely connected to their campuses, have a higher risk of attrition. The most recent examination of students attending four-year colleges found that students who lived with parents were about 23 percent more likely than on-campus students to drop out during their first year. This increased risk was largely due to lower levels of academic integration, such as participating in study groups, meeting with academic advisers, and talking with faculty outside of class.13
Students who are only loosely connected to their colleges are forced to rely almost exclusively on their own motivation and formal sources of information, rather than being buoyed by peers who are on the same journey. Lucia longed to be more socially integrated into campus life and did not hesitate to move to campus when the opportunity presented itself. This move transformed her college experience, strengthened her academic identity, and increased her educational aspirations. Even though Sammy would have enjoyed dorm life, his personality and targeted institutional supports ensured that commuting was a manageable challenge to developing a sense of campus belonging.
Some students, like Sammy, are able to make commuting work for them and remain engaged and connected despite their distance from campus. Meanwhile, other commuting students, like Lucia, experience both a physical and social distance from campus that can only be rectified by the campus integration that living in dorms provides. Although Kara would benefit from dorming, she is not doing college wrong. By working full-time and adjusting her course schedule to maximize her limited time on campus, she is doing college in the only way that her financial resources allow. She is determined to reach graduation day and hopes to live in a dorm for her senior year, when it would be financially viable.
Much of the existing research on commuting students takes a deficit framework—that is, commuting is viewed as a deficit imposed on the student rather than a disconnection between the student’s status as a commuter and the institutionally expected residential student status. This deficit framework denies the skills, such as time management, initiative, experience in the job market, and cultural code-switching, that commuting students, especially historically marginalized commuting students, learn to master. Understanding and adequately supporting commuting students requires attending to structural inequalities that position them as deviant from and marginal to the ways that residential students are integrated into campus life and supported in finding a campus home.