How to Foster Sense of Belonging

Creating environments where students feel connected to peers and your institution is a crucial part of student success.

Do you remember how you felt when you started a new education journey? Whether it was kindergarten, high school, or higher learning, you were likely nervous. Excited, but nervous. Would you understand the course material and know how to find your classes? Would you make friends? Would your teacher like you? ? College can be a daunting experience for many students, especially for those who are attending school far from home or who are the first in their family to navigate higher education. Everyone wants to find their place and feel seen Lacking a sense of community, students can feel disconnected and/or heightened imposter syndrome; things that typically result in a higher likelihood of dropping out or stopping out from an institution. Fostering sense of belonging is an important part of any postsecondary student success strategy, because it means that the institution is taking into account the intersecting identities and the experiences of their students through a holistic culture of care. In short, working toward higher student belonging leads to higher student retention.

11062b_5bf144f8ae764a70ad76808589f02c12~mv2_d_6000_4000_s_4_2

Reasons why fostering a sense of belonging at your institution should be a top priority:

From a Student's Perspective...

Belonging is a human need.
Being able to integrate into both a school’s academic system and social system are key to feeling like you belong.
Fostering a sense of belonging promotes engagement, motivation, and persistence; leading to higher levels of academic achievement and emotional well being for students.

From the Institution's Perspective…

Sense of belonging contributes to student retention
The importance of students’ sense of belonging in determining their likelihood of success within educational institutions is well documented in academic literature.
One prominent indicator of student persistence is feeling a sense of belonging or an identification and affiliation with a community. Meeting students where they are and creating opportunities for them to feel a sense of community and sense of purpose at an institution is an essential part of maintaining a high student retention rate.
Studies show, students who feel connected to their peers, faculty, and staff are more likely to stay at an institution and have a higher motivation to finish their degree.

Lead with Access and Inclusivity

Fostering an inclusive campus culture is essential for creating a welcoming and supportive environment for all students. Creating a culture that values and respects diversity, promotes equity, and encourages inclusion can help students feel more connected to their campus community and increase student belonging.

Key to knowing where to go is knowing where you are with diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on campus. Disaggregating retention and graduation rates by demographic and various identities can provide initial insights into student populations that aren’t seeking out campus resources or feel disconnected from your community. Once identified, assessing student sentiment through surveys throughout the year also provides context to how students are feeling.

Setting the stage for a welcoming campus means embracing the diversity of a student body and creating safe spaces and systems that allow them to bring their most authentic selves to campus. Do all of your students know where your Title IX office is or what it does? Do faculty and staff look like the students that attend the university? Is the curriculum inclusive of various student needs and experiences? All of these questions speak to institutional level strategy and are valuable in communicating broader goals and missions…but how do they look at a programmatic level?

Creating safe spaces for marginalized students is high on the list and speaks to identity-conscious mechanisms that inherently build community through mere exposure and awareness. These spaces can be designated clubs or organizations where students can feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and feelings. They can also connect students through peer mentorship programs, so that outside of traditional school and office hours, students have an experienced guide to the institution.

Colleges can organize cultural events and activities that showcase different cultures and traditions. For instance, a college can have an annual cultural fair where students can display their cultural heritage through music, dance, art, and food. These events can help create a sense of community and promote cross-cultural understanding.

Measure & Benchmark Sense of Belonging

You’ve likely experienced this on your own, but measuring students’ sense of belonging is tricky. There is no universally accepted method to measure student belonging at higher education institutions.

There are certain data points that can be gathered, reviewed, and used to make inferences when it comes to creating a sense of community for students. And that’s important because benchmarking sense of belonging is a crucial part of your student success strategy. Only by benchmarking student sentiment and analyzing the trends over time can you see if your efforts to foster sense of belonging have an impact.

Looking to peer institutions’ assessment practices can be a helpful guide if you’re unsure where to start. There is an abundance of published research from across all facets of higher education on how they have measured student belonging.

Having the right mechanism to deploy and track assessments can be another barrier to progress. That’s why within Mentor Collective’s mentorship solutions, self-reported assessment is paramount. Our SMS technology allows institutions to deploy peer-reviewed assessments that measure non-cognitive indicators of student persistence and retention – namely sense of belonging and academic self efficacy. Administrators of our peer mentoring programs then have access to that data and are able to view trends and intervene with resources on an individual level. For institutional data, this measurement provides a view of how students feel at the beginning of their peer mentorship as well as at the middle and end of their mentorship. For administrators working toward whole-institution change, real-time survey data means not having to wait for the end of the year to make an impact with existing campus resources.

Overall, our partners experienced an 8% increase in sense of belonging amongst those who participated in the peer mentorship program. Plus, that number was even higher when mentees and mentors shared 3 or more conversations through our platform. Contact us to learn more about our peer mentorship program and sense of belonging methodology.

No matter how you measure sense of belonging, it is important to compare the data across multiple timeframes such as semester-over-semester, or year-over-year to understand the impact of your student success strategy. As you do the comparison, make sure you note institutional changes that you have implemented to get a holistic view of which factors affected sense of belonging.

Encourage Student Engagement

To feel more connected to a place, group, or experience, you have to get involved and stay involved. One of the most effective ways to increase students’ sense of belonging is to encourage student engagement. Colleges and universities can promote student engagement by offering extracurricular activities, clubs, and organizations.

But remember, it isn’t enough to just have extracurricular activities. Colleges and universities must also make it easy for students to find out about the extracurricular activities and make sure they are easily accessible.

Here are a handful of ways you can encourage student engagement:

Host and Promote a Diverse Range of Extracurricular Activities: It’s important to make sure you’re offering a variety of extracurricular activities that cater to a wide range of interests. It’s common sense, but when there are more options available, it’s more likely that students will find an activity that interests them. Take time to audit your offerings and identify opportunities for growth. Whether it’s community service organizations, sports, academic groups, or clubs, find an area where you can increase the number of activities offered.

Remind Students of the Benefits of Extracurricular Activities: The benefits of extracurricular activities go far beyond building relationships with people on campus. It’s important to help students understand that these activities can help them improve their leadership skills, academic performance, and add skills to their resume.
Make All Activities Easily Accessible: Many times programs miss capturing the students who could really benefit from them. Organize efforts to provide transportation to the activities as well as work directly with student organizations on campus to ensure activities have a variety of times where students can participate. Peer ambassadors or mentors can also help break down any stigmas that might prevent students from getting involved on campus.
Provide Incentives: Offering rewards or course credit for participation can be an effective motivator for students. Consider offering certificates or even scholarships for students who participate in and excel in extracurricular activities.

Leverage Student Voice & Peer Insights

The work of cultivating a sense of belonging is a never-ending job. Fostering students’ sense of belonging is a continual process that requires careful planning and attention. When it comes to understanding where your institution stands, current students and alumni are an excellent source of information when trying to uncover the root causes of imposter syndrome or disengagement.

Ensuring you’re capturing student feedback to inform your student success strategies is crucial to fostering a sense of belonging and ultimately crucial to your institution’s success.

Surveys: Many students look for opportunities to share feedback, and the good thing is, you’re likely to get both ends of the spectrum…the very good and the very bad. Keep in mind that you’ll want to survey students at specific points in their journey because that will yield the most insight into the stages that require more intervention and attention. Surveys should combine demographic data and come from multiple sources to ensure you’re getting a holistic view of the barriers (or successes!) students encounter.

Peer Mentoring Programs: Launching a peer mentorship program can be a great way to gather student insights and support a sense of belonging. Students will tell peers things that they may not share with their academic advisors, their professors, and other staff at your institution. These insights are incredibly valuable because they are genuine and often shared in real-time. You likely would not be able to gather this information via other methods. These details can be key to diagnosing underlying issues that affect student retention. It's important to note that peer relationships provide the greatest impact when mentees and mentors are thoughtfully matched across various dimensions of identity and mentors understand the scope of their responsibility and the support behind their role

Student-Associations: Keep the student voice at the forefront of student access planning by holding events that give students access to leadership and invite honest feedback about the policies, curriculum and services at an institution. This can be an effective way to encourage dialogue about the student experience

If you need help launching a mentoring program to get student insights, you can read more about Mentor Collective’s solutions here!

Offer Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Training

Your student population will not be homogeneous. There will be people from different backgrounds, with different life experiences and different values. Your institution plays an important role in cultivating not only a sense of belonging, but an environment where students feel safe.

Training helps us become more aware of invisible barriers and our own unconscious biases. It also encourages positive behaviors and attitudes. This awareness leads to behavior change, which can lead to a more inclusive environment.

Having an Integrated Student Success Strategy

The key word here is “integrated.” A strong student success strategy goes beyond offering support services like tutoring, academic advising, and career counseling. True integrated student success strategies leverage cross-campus collaboration to weave support services together for a holistic view of the issues that could be impacting your student persistence and retention. Further, having a mechanism that allows these functions to communicate to one another effectively – especially when it comes to more serious barriers that impact student success – provides administrators a means of real-time intervention and leadership with a window into the practices and policies that aren't reaching today's diverse student population.

Offer Peer Membership

Mentorship programs can be an excellent tool for fostering sense of belonging on campus.

Students tell their peers things that they won’t tell campus faculty and staff, thus opening another channel to understand the student voice and experience. Peers mentors can also guide their mentees to your campus resources that are designed to support student success.

The institutions that partner with us to scale peer mentorship have achieved an average increase of 5.67% in retention while partnering with us.