Community College Student Preferences for Support When Classes Go Online

As colleges and universities shifted the bulk of their classes online in response to COVID-19, there was also a concomitant shift in how students could be supported by institutions. Yet, very little is known about the support networks that students tap into when confronted with such change, and there is reason to believe that students' ability to access and benefit from online support structures—and the social connections they make—might be moderated by their digital skills and competencies. The purpose of this chapter is to better understand what support networks students preferred to access when classes moved online, and whether techno-capital, a measure of digital skills and knowledge, influenced these choices. This chapter summarizes research findings from multivariate regression models that used student data collected from a community college in the USA, just after the classes migrated online. The chapter concludes with recommendations based on this research.