College students know they get emails. The challenge is
actually getting them to read messages, according to a study from Bowling Green
State University, Bowling Green, OH.
Researchers polled 315 students about their email,
social media, and text-messaging habits in the 2015 survey. They found that 85%
said they check their university email daily and will open messages that
interest them, particularly from faculty.
On the flip side, 72% said they avoid messages from
organizations on campus, viewing those emails as spam. The survey also found
that 39% of students don’t always read emails from academic advisers and 54% will
skip emails from the university or academic departments.
Just over 50% of the students said they used text
messaging for most of their communications, followed by social media (35%), and
email (12%). Those students most active on social media were least likely to
avoid emails.
“Text messaging and many social media tools seem to
carry a greater expectation that viewing and responding happen as a real-time
conversation,” Bernard R. McCoy, associate professor of journalism at the
University of Nebraska at Lincoln, said about the BGSU research in a report for Inside Higher Education. “You send a text message, you expect a quick
reply. You receive a text message, you expect to read it and reply to it.”
Email
gives users the freedom to read and respond or ignore, according to McCoy. Besides,
students also know they are getting far more junk emails than junk text
messages.
