From my (limited) experience, I think many colleges and universities have, since the 1970s, made it significantly harder for off-campus organizations to establish student chapters. A lot of the rules and regulations were probably put into place to keep out the Moonies and cults and whatnot. But, basically, students have to instigate organizations from within the university, and if they've never even heard of the SCA, well, it's a catch-22....
A couple of years ago my barony looked into setting up a table at the student activities fair at the large flagship state university near our fighter practice location, but for all the hoops we would have had to jump through just to get a card table at the fringe of the event, on a weekday when most of us (of any age) had to go to work ... it wasn't worth it.
Finally, universities make it a real PITA for outsiders to rent space ... and their stupid restrictions banning the serving of ANY food that isn't catered by the university makes it impossible to serve a medieval feast. Oh, and their food is REALLY expensive, too.
Oh, trust me, I'm familiar with the red tape. They impose those restrictions even on meetings - we had to buy pop and cookies from University Housing, rather than order out of pizza if we were using a room in the student union or some such. And that was even for dorm meetings. Yes on the expensive!
The situation varies from Uni to Uni - Sometimes having enough of a student presence to be a registered student organization is worth it in access to or discounts on certain spaces. Sometimes it isn't.
However, the crux of the matter is that nurturing a student population will probably never be that "worth it" to the permanent residents of the local group in a college town. And yet, it is "worth it" to the SCA as a whole. But that worth is so nebulous and so "far away" that it's hard for the local group to justify all that effort that never pays off on their radar screen.
Hence, my suggestions on expanding the ability to hook and keep the age group on more of a Kingdom-wide level.
The issue (at least over here) is that universities have a tendency to set themselves up as little cities, so you have no need to get off campus. One of our bigger problems, when I was silly enough to start up a college, was that most of the students didn't want to go off-campus to do wider SCA things. They would happily show up to the in-college stuff, but were less inclined to attend the big stuff because it was a different social group.
The interesting thing is that I left that college about 5 years ago, and people who had known about the SCA through that, but never joined, have started popping up in their geographically local group. So it seems to work as a form of passive advertising.
A couple of years ago my barony looked into setting up a table at the student activities fair at the large flagship state university near our fighter practice location, but for all the hoops we would have had to jump through just to get a card table at the fringe of the event, on a weekday when most of us (of any age) had to go to work ... it wasn't worth it.
Finally, universities make it a real PITA for outsiders to rent space ... and their stupid restrictions banning the serving of ANY food that isn't catered by the university makes it impossible to serve a medieval feast. Oh, and their food is REALLY expensive, too.
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The situation varies from Uni to Uni - Sometimes having enough of a student presence to be a registered student organization is worth it in access to or discounts on certain spaces. Sometimes it isn't.
However, the crux of the matter is that nurturing a student population will probably never be that "worth it" to the permanent residents of the local group in a college town. And yet, it is "worth it" to the SCA as a whole. But that worth is so nebulous and so "far away" that it's hard for the local group to justify all that effort that never pays off on their radar screen.
Hence, my suggestions on expanding the ability to hook and keep the age group on more of a Kingdom-wide level.
Reply
The interesting thing is that I left that college about 5 years ago, and people who had known about the SCA through that, but never joined, have started popping up in their geographically local group. So it seems to work as a form of passive advertising.
Reply
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