A student survey at a metropolitan university examined priorities of both traditional and non-traditional students; the survey resulted from anxieties expressed by some students about not having a traditional college experience. The administration was trying to decide whether to allocate resources to create a football program within this commuter, urban university. The study focused on student priorities as a way to evaluate the relative importance to students of differing aspects of campus life. Results indicated that most students selected academic enhancements over social and recreational ones, but students were not monolithic in their responses. Subcommunities emerged with different academic emphases and different social priorities. Students' ideas about community were more closely associated with social interactions among family, college and non-college friends, and colleagues at work rather than with ideas about an academic or intellectual community. Results suggest that the development of academic communities at college campuses, as well as future student support priority determinations, will need to take into account the fact that no one issue is predominant for the increasing numbers of students that have significant off-campus obligations. (Contains nine references.) (Author/GLR)