Episode 115: Jeff Doyle, Suzanne Rivera, and James Vasquez on Belonging [Webinar]
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How can institutions define and measure belonging? What are inspirational examples of programs, spaces, and support services that foster it? How is student belonging changing, and how can folks adapt? In a LinkedIn Live Webinar, Elliot Felix talked through these questions with Suzanne Rivera the President at Macalester College, Jeff Doyle the Executive Director of Student Support at UT Austin, and James Vasquez the Associate Dean of Operations and Strategy at the USC Annenberg School. They share different perspectives along with the programs and places they’ve used to foster belonging and drive student success – from environments to athletics to communications and more.
Beyond the Quad: How Higher Ed Leaders Are Redefining Student Belonging
When a student walks onto a college campus, their success hinges on a single, powerful feeling: Do I belong here?
While higher education has traditionally focused on academic preparedness and financial aid, modern research reveals that a student’s perceived social support and feeling of mattering are just as critical. In fact, data shows that first-year students who experience a strong sense of belonging are 41% more likely to be retained into their second year.
To explore how institutions can intentionally foster this connection in a previous LinkedIn Live Webinar, Elliot Felix talked through these with Suzanne Rivera the President at Macalester College, Jeff Doyle the Executive Director of Student Support at UT Austin, and James Vasquez the Associate Dean of Operations and Strategy at the USC Annenberg School.
They share different perspectives along with the programs and places they’ve used to foster belonging and drive student success – from environments to athletics to communications and more.
The Metrics of Mattering: How to Measure Student Belonging
Belonging can often feel like a fuzzy, purely qualitative concept. However, higher education leaders are discovering that it can—and must—be quantified to drive institutional change.
Jeff Doyle shared a groundbreaking fall-to-fall analysis evaluating over 100 variables used to predict student retention. The single most predictive factor? A student’s response to the question: "Do you feel like you belong at this institution?" This one metric was five times more predictive of retention than any other variable analyzed.
To move from a vague feeling to actionable data, Doyle developed a sense of belonging inventory based on five core domains:
Institutional Identification: Are students proud to represent the university?
Faculty/Staff Connections: Can the student name a faculty or staff member who has taken a personal interest in them?
Peer Connections: Has the student formed meaningful friendships on campus?
Social Capital: Do students feel they have the necessary help and resources to succeed?
Social Acceptance: Do students feel accepted for exactly who they are?
Measuring these domains at regular intervals allows institutions to move past simply gathering data and begin creating targeted interventions for vulnerable students.
Designing for Connection: The Physical Campus and Shared Spaces
Once an institution begins tracking data, the next step is shaping an environment that physically manifests a sense of community.
James Vasquez highlighted how the USC Annenberg School approached space planning by launching an extensive ethnographic study. By conducting cross-functional workshops with students, faculty, and staff, they discovered that the campus community craved natural light, collaborative food spaces, and environments where they could "see and be seen."
The resulting facility transcended departmental boundaries. Today, roughly 40% of the students utilizing the space are from outside the Annenberg School. This proves that intentional, inclusive architecture naturally breaks down campus silos. At Macalester College, President Suzanne Rivera used data mapping to identify a major disconnect on campus. Heat maps revealed that the main administrative building had the highest student foot traffic, yet contained zero student-facing offices.
In a bold move to prioritize student success, the college relocated its advancement and fundraising teams off-campus and transformed the first floor into a vibrant hub for student affairs, student government, and campus clubs.
Cultivating Micro-Communities and Niche Belonging
While university-wide traditions like football games and orientation ceremonies create a broad sense of community, true longevity is found in micro-communities.
"Belonging is everyone's job," Elliot Felix noted, emphasizing that students need to find their people at different scales. Whether it's through a massive student organization or a hyper-specific niche club (like a doctor pepper fan club), providing pathways to engagement is vital.
To bridge this gap, institutions are implementing highly intentional programs:
Student Involvement Advisors: Moving beyond traditional academic advising, placing student-led engagement offices near popular campus hubs helps un-connected students navigate campus clubs.
Intimate Traditions: UT Austin’s "Dinner with 16 Longhorns" brings random students and faculty together at donor homes to break down political, racial, and generational barriers over a shared meal.
Inclusive Athletics: Utilizing Division III athletics and campus sports as diverse, high-energy spaces to foster institutional pride and collective joy for athletes and non-athletes alike.
Human Connection in a High-Tech Future
Looking ahead, higher education face a changing landscape dominated by hybrid learning and AI-driven retention tools. While chatbots and automated messaging platforms can assist with middle-of-the-night logistics, the panel agreed that technology cannot replace human empathy.
The true future of building a robust sense of community lies in scaling human-to-human interaction. Leaders must focus on peer leadership programs, intensive case-management systems, and intrusive advising models to ensure students don't fall through the cracks.
True belonging means realizing that the university belongs to the students themselves. When we empower students with institutional ownership, we shift their experience from merely surviving to genuinely flourishing.
Episode 115 Transcript
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Elliot Felix: Welcome everyone to a special episode of the Connected College podcast. Last year, as I launched the book, I organized a series of webinars on key topics that showcased some of the great contributors to the book that I interviewed. This week on the Connected College podcast, I'm sharing one of those webinars, which was focused on building community and belonging, it features Suzanne Rivera from Macalester College, Jeff Doyle from UT Austin, and James Vasquez from USC. We had a great conversation about defining and measuring belonging. We talked through inspirational examples of initiatives and programs and spaces and support services, and then we looked into the future to understand how this might change and how folks can adapt. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Connected College podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and the way they're organized to enable student success. Join me for insightful interviews with higher ed innovators, sharing the stories, stats, and strategies to create better connected colleges and universities. Welcome everyone. We're here to talk about building a sense of community and belonging and how that contributes to student success. And really we're focused on this key question: how can institutions build community and belonging and enable student success? And we're gonna have a great conversation about that with ideas from the book, with our panelists here, and with all of you listening and learning and watching together. The way that's gonna be structured, first we're gonna have a little bit of introduction and orientation. That's happening right now. I think it's going pretty well. And then we're gonna have three sections, each talking about and focused on a specific question. So the metrics, and our panel will weigh in, and then we'll open it up to questions and comments from the audience. Secondly, we'll talk about examples of collaborative cross-functional initiatives and then again, our panel will weigh in, and we'll open it up for discussion. And thirdly, we'll get our crystal balls out, shine them up a little bit, and think about what we need to anticipate for the future when it comes to community and belonging, and then we'll we'll wrap things up. So that'll be the structure. Lots of chances to participate including hearing from you all about what helped you feel a sense of belonging. That's coming shortly. Before we get to that, I wanna hear from our esteemed panel and have everybody introduce themselves. I'll start off by saying I'm Elliot Felix. I lead the higher ed advisory practice at the global engineering and consulting firm called Buro Happold, and I'm a student success author and speaker as well, having written The Connected College with lots of these folks here today.
James Vasquez: Good morning, everybody. James Vasquez, I'm Associate Dean of Operations and Strategy at the USC Annenberg School, and also I'm a faculty member at the Marshall School of Business, where I teach a behavior organization and leadership class. I'm a long-term university administrator and educator. Been at USC for the last 30 years. Good to see everybody.
Suzanne Rivera: Greetings everyone. My name is Suzanne Rivera, and I am the 17th president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Macalester is a small, independent liberal arts college here in the Twin Cities. Like my colleague James, I also have been working in higher education for about 30 years. This is my first presidency, but I also was vice president for research and a faculty member in bioethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. I also worked at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, and at UC Irvine. Glad to be with you today.
Jeff Doyle: Hello, folks. My name's Jeff Doyle. Good to meet you. I originally grew up in Maryland. My father was a professor at a historically Black college there, and so I've been on campuses my whole life. Went to University of Virginia for nine years, but got a few degrees there, and then worked in Virginia, worked in the mountains of North Carolina for seven years at Appalachian State. I was at Baylor for a number of years, and then most recently at SMU Southwestern, and then two, two and a half weeks ago, I started at University of Texas Austin. So excited to get to know you guys.
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Elliot Felix: I'm gonna spend the next couple minutes sharing some of the big ideas from the book, and as we move ahead, I think a great place to start is a definition, and of course, there's many definitions, but I happen to like Dr. Terrell Strayhorn's college student sense of belonging. He literally wrote the book on belonging. I like to joke, it's one of my many dad jokes or bad jokes. But it's a powerful definition, and it's that student's perceived sense of social support on campus, their feeling connected, the experience of mattering feeling cared about, accepted, respected, valued, and really important to the campus community and others, such as faculty, staff, peers. Now, we know that's really important, but we also know only 65% of students feel like they belong at their institution. This is from the National College Health Assessment. We also know that this really matters. NSSE found that first year students who feel a sense of belonging are 41% more likely to be retained into their second year. Persistence probably higher still. So belonging is really foundational to student success and it's more than involvement. I think sometimes people hear belonging and they think, "Oh, that's student affairs needs to get people more involved in, going to events or joining a student organization," and we need that. But we need more than that because belonging is really, it's really everyone's job. And community and belonging are fostered in many settings, right? It might be when faculty shift to an active learning model and students are working in teams on real-world projects that matter to them, and they feel like they matter because they're a part of that. Or it may be a mentor or faculty office hours, or it may be at that event or in that student organization. It may be when you go to the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers that you find your people in that place, and maybe you find a mentor or a role model or someone who needs an intern that summer, and it's through your career path that is fostered. So we know that because it's fostered in different settings and different scales, that students are finding their people in different places and programs and career paths, and it's really about bringing those all together and doing that in a way that isn't just about, big tents, football games, picnics on the quad, but it's also about small niches, right? That might be about your program, it might be about your interest. Here in Minneapolis, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, one of my favorite things, there's a student group which is fans of Dr Pepper. And there isn't a lofty ambition. There is just coming together to celebrate Dr Pepper. And it's pretty great. I actually don't even drink Dr Pepper, but I'm a huge fan of that club. So I think there's lots of ways to get together. There are lots of small niches we can create.
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Elliot Felix: Because belonging can be this-- we know it's important, but it can be fuzzy for people, and there can be different definitions, and it can be seen as purely qualitative. How do you actually quantify it? How do you measure it? And how can you use that to guide your work? And Jeff, would love to hear from you first on this one.
Jeff Doyle: Sure. Yeah. The easiest way and I mentioned this earlier to the presenters, is that you know it when you feel it. And so we started out doing this at one school I was at by just saying, "Do you feel like you belong here?" And we looked at over 100 variables that we used to predict retention, and every year we did fall-to-fall analysis using several types of multi-regression, and we tried to look at which of these 100 variables were most predictive. And believe it or not, the question of, "Do you feel like you belong at this institution?" was five times more predictive than any other variable that we looked at out of these 100. In the last year, I actually created a sense of belonging inventory. There are several out there. But the one that I've created, is based on five main domains, and that is, does the student identify with the university? Are people wearing the name of your university on their shirt when they're walking around campus? Are they proud to say they go to school there? Have they identified with a faculty or staff member? We used to ask, "Name one faculty or staff member who's taken an interest in getting to know you." And if they didn't put anyone, we reached out to them, and if they put people's names, we actually went out and celebrated those people too. The third one is, have you identified with peers? Have you made a connection with someone that could be a friend, and there's two or three questions for each of these in my inventory. So we've got identify with the university, faculty and staff, and your peers. And then the other two are, do they have some degree of social capital, which obviously you don't ask them, "Do you have social capital?" But you ask them a question that might get at that "Do you feel like you have the help you need to succeed here?" Or, "Do you see yourself succeeding here?" And then the fifth one is social acceptance, which is, do you feel like people like you? Do you feel like people accept you for who you are? So those are the five variables that are part of mine.
Elliot Felix: That's great. James, Suzanne what are your thoughts on measurements or measurement metrics that you're using as you think about belonging?
James Vasquez: Or from my perspective, and I actually just, listening to Jeff and seeing the work that he's done is that I, as I look at this, I think about it from a holistic perspective, right? You think about the student component, but also what Jeff's referring to includes an element of staff and faculty also, right? That point of connectivity across your ecosystem. And how you measure that really it's, I don't have Jeff's insight into how you can use that, how you can get to those metrics. But getting those metrics provides such a valuable insight for the community administration, for faculty to understand where their students are at. And really more importantly, in trying to design programming or efforts to be able to increase and focus on those particular areas. There's such a broad component. You do one little piece that adds to solving an issue, and it actually scales across your community.
Suzanne Rivera: I was just gonna say I really appreciate Jeff's empirical approach and the only thing I would add is to say that we measure the things we care about. And if you care enough about a sense of belonging to measure how well students are feeling it or how deeply they're feeling it, the next thing is what are you gonna do with the information you get back? It's not enough just to measure. You need to measure at regular intervals to tell you whether the interventions you create to increase a sense of belonging actually are having any impact at all. Because I think in the academy, in higher education, we're notorious for asking questions that we actually don't address the answers to. So I think if we're gonna ask, we have to be prepared to hear some things that might be uncomfortable about traditions or customs or habits in the academy that perhaps some people take for granted and haven't stopped to really interrogate and ask whether they're creating obstacles to belonging. If we ask those questions with an open mind and an open heart, we might learn that, that we've all grown accustomed to doing things that don't foster a sense of belonging for everyone. And then if we're serious we have to be prepared to change.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. What I love about all three of these comments is the connections between them because Jeff, it is really interesting you're saying, we're asking people have they made a faculty connection? And if they have, yes, go, go recognize and reward. But if they haven't, follow up because there's an opportunity or a vulnerability there. And then James, you're saying Belonging isn't just in terms of students, right? It's it's faculty and staff and community and alumni together, and I think that's one of the big messages of the book that came from hearing from conversations like these and smart folks like all of you, is student success can't come at the expense of another group, right? Student success is only as good as faculty success and staff success, or the mantra, the Richard Branson mantra, you can't put your customers first. You have to put your people first, and they take care of your customers. So I love all that, and that it's not just gathering the data it's acting on it.
Jeff Doyle: We found that, faculty are rewarded often for scholarship, maybe their teaching evals. But by reaching out to the faculty who were mentioned by the most students as helping them feel like they belong, many of them wanted those letters in their tenure files, and we would, offer to send letters to their supervisors. But it was another way to recognize faculty for the unseen things that faculty are not rewarded for. And so we identified a top 10 faculty for building sense of belonging at the university and shared that with a number of people and got a couple press releases on these people are doing this. And what... I think when you look back at the Purdue Gallup study studied who was most engaged in their careers, and then they retroactively looked at what happened to them in college that made them that way, and they had a big three. And those three things were someone taught me that was excited about what they were teaching me. But number two and three were, someone showed they cared about me that worked at the university, and someone took the time to meet with me one-on-one. And so this was like several hundred thousand people. Yeah. And those who were more engaged in their careers had people care about them and meet with them one-on-one.
Elliot Felix: And so another way of reminding ourselves of the value of this. Yeah. The Gallup Purdue Index is a great, resource, and I love that mentoring had the biggest multiplier effect. Someone who was meeting with me one-on-one and encouraging me to pursue my dreams was the biggest driver of engagement in post-graduation, so in the, in your career in the workplace.
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Elliot Felix: Let's move on to our second question which is sharing an example, a collaborative cross-functional initiative to increase belonging. James, do you want to start us off?
James Vasquez: Thank you, Elliot. And actually, and this is actually the example I have ties right back into Elliot, and I mentioned this earlier. 15 years ago we ended up hiring a company that Elliot worked with at the time, and that company was brought in to really do an ethnographic study of our environment. And basically, we were trying to figure out what facilities did we actually need to further develop our community. And the idea is that, okay, we need to go out, we need to build a new facility, but how would we do that? And so we end up, we went out and hired Elliot's company at the time, and they were brought in to do workshops across our campus community environment. We had student focus groups, staff focus groups, faculty focus groups from external, and we brought them in and we asked them a couple of questions like, "What do you want in your new environment?" We build an, a brand new structure, what do you want that to look like, and what pieces do you actually want to have as part of your community environment? Really was a, it was a cross collaborative environment discussion that allowed us to not only engage each member, each group of our population, but also to come out with an invested interest in how are we going to develop that. And, and we came up with the very simple ideas of people wanted natural light. Key element, natural light. People wanted to have food. They wanted spaces that they can actually collaborate on, to see to be seen, to sit in an environment where they can see what's happening across the institution. And then they also wanted a place where they knew that they could have, high quality academic learning. And so as we came out of these conversations, it allowed us to pinpoint various student groups, and specifically student groups, to provide them with the opportunity to invest in the construction of a space that was not going to be used by them, because most of the students that actually participated were going to be graduated by the time we actually built the facility. That was really critical, but by adding them into that environment and that conversation, they actually feel much more invested because they knew they were going to invest in the future. And so you fast-forward to where we're at today, and, our, the facility that they helped design is now 10 years in the making, and all the things that we talked about and we focused on have really become a... and actually exceeded tenfold what we thought it was going to exceed, because we knew at the time if you invest, that they would use. And our mantra at the time was, "If you build it, they'll come," but we really didn't know how much they were going to come and how much they were going to invest in the outcome of that facility. Today, most people don't know the background about how it was done, but the people that were invested at the time will come back and go, "Wow, we actually created this space, and look what it accomplished." And there's a lot to share about what we're doing with the space. When I think about belonging, I actually think about the physicality of what we provide in our environment to actually foster that sense of community. There's so many takeaways here, but the one thing that really is the most critical for us is that, this is my unscientific it's not my Jeff Doyle approach to this, but it is I expect that 40% of the people that are in this facility today are not our Annenberg students, journalism, communication, PR. They come from across the campus community, which is what we designed the space for. So that's just my, how have we done that, that one thing that we did to engage the community at multiple levels. But of course, it takes time, investment but also being very deliberate.
Suzanne Rivera: I love that example. We did something similar at Macalester to create our comprehensive facility plan, and we were surprised. Coming back to what I said before, when you ask a question, you should be prepared that the answer could surprise you, it could delight you, it could challenge you. We were surprised, for example, that we gave students maps of the campus that they could play with their finger and tell us where they... how they get to all the places they go. And we found that there was like a heat map that showed that the main administrative building where my office is, the president's office and other administrative offices, is the one building that, that people walk by the most. But we had no student-facing offices in this building. So we actually took that feedback and got rid of offices on the first floor that were for the advancement and fundraising team, and we moved them off campus because their audience is really our alumni, who are no longer here. And we moved student affairs onto the first floor of this building, including a space just for students, like student government and student clubs. And now the first floor of the building has students in it all the time which is a decision we probably wouldn't have made if we hadn't done that exercise. Another example I would offer is that when we did our strategic plan here, we engaged in a really unorthodox procedure to do it. Rather than me just appointing a committee of faculty and staff and asking them to come up with a draft, we opened up applications to anyone in the community, faculty, staff, students, alumni, parents of current students, and even residents of local neighborhoods around the college. And we invited people to apply to be strategic planning champions. And then we read the hundreds of essays people wrote about why they wanted to be involved, and we selected a few representatives of each of those constituencies and worked with them for over a year to review and collate all the survey and interview information we were getting, and asked them to tell us, the senior leadership team, "Where do you see common themes emerging?" So it took more time than you would like a strategic plan to take but because it was so inclusive and so deliberative, everybody in our community really felt like they could see themselves in the words of the eventual plan, and they felt the plan belonged to them in a way that I think has been really powerful.
Jeff Doyle: That's great. Quick examples, guys. And I think physical design of space is key if anyone gets a chance to speak into that. I'll speak to a couple other areas, and one is sense of belong is through connection outside of classes. So we learned that the students, 70% of our students at Baylor were in a student org, and those students were much more likely to succeed. So then the question is, if you're not required to get involved in an org, how do we help them do that? And we had academic advisors, we had career advisors, but we didn't have student engagement advisors. So we basically put an office next to basically the coffee shop that everyone liked to go to and turned it over to what we call the student involvement advisors and we put mainly students there that were juniors and seniors, and they met with any student that hadn't gotten connected to a student organization and had a map of all 300-something student orgs and think through, you want an academic, a cultural, a social connection, an athletic connection. What is it that we can help you get connected to? How do we get you involved? Here's the leaders of that organization you can reach out to. So that, that was exciting to me to see getting-- being more intentional about plugging them in. Another one I did just this past week, actually, at UT, they have something called, it's a odd name, it's called Dinner with 16 Longhorns. They invited random students to apply to go to dinner with other people they don't know. And so we all go to a house of a donor, which is creative, savvy. UT has quite a nice endowment, but we go to a donor's house and off campus, we give them a ride there. And then people like me facilitate a conversation about getting to know each other and then talking about differences and people we've met that are different than us in life. And across the political, racial, age spectrum, I had dinner with a group of... I had eight students, someone else had eight students, and it was a three-hour thing, and by the end of it, they were all exchanging numbers. They wanted to know how to reach out with me. And so it was a beautiful, small example of bringing people together around food and fellowship and creating a sense of belonging. And one other I'll just mention is if you've ever read the article "Who Gets to Graduate?" published in New York Times in like 2012, '13, it's about how a small intervention about telling students, "You belong here," which I think we've seen over the last ten years spread nationally. But those little messages of reminding students that everyone here belongs here, and that means maybe putting students on stage at convocation or in publicity materials that look like all of our students, everyone that got admitted here belongs here, and those messages remind them of, "Yes, I do have value, and I can be seen here."
Elliot Felix: I love all these examples. Using the environment, creating an inclusive environment where everyone feels welcome and people are crossing paths and making connections, and that you have to engage people in the right way to make that environment inclusive and build that sense of ownership. I love the meeting students where they are, whether it's an engagement advisor to help them get connected to a, an organization or moving student services to be along the beaten path, the desire line. These are really great these are really great examples. We have one question, thanks Steven, about coffee shops or environments I see students, faculty, and staff populate regularly. Who wants to weigh in on curating subcultures that, that attract belonging and not... And, Jeff, you just mentioned food and fellowship, and James, you've talked, everyone's talked about the role that the physical campus plays. Anybody would want, wanna weigh in on curated communities?
Jeff Doyle: We had something yesterday at UT, which I'd never seen at another university, and I'm like, "This makes so much sense," but it was called Marketplace. And you know how businesses are trying to get on campus all the time and sell their stuff to students? So UT basically says, "Hey, we're gonna let everyone come on campus," and once in the fall, once in the spring. It's called the UT Marketplace. All you have to do is give out free stuff. If you guarantee you're giving free stuff to our students, we want you here. And so it drew thousands and thousands of students. I ended up walking away with five free T-shirts myself. But it was, the students, there were lines of hundreds of students, and I'm not sure what they were giving away was the things that changed a life, but I was like, "This is a really smart idea." 'Cause then they put some student groups in there and faculty connections and some other positive influences among these, and they're suddenly exposed to thousands of students getting there to get free stuff.
Elliot Felix: That's awesome. And I also wanna follow up the who gets to graduate article and the idea that a small thing can make a big difference. There's a whole body of literature on wise interventions, these small things you can do that make a huge impact. One of them I talk about in the book, simply reading a paragraph that talks about, the fact that feel- feeling a sense of belonging takes time, and not feeling it is common at the onset. There's evidence that, just reading a passage as part of a class is associated with an increase in academic performance as well as retention. So that's a great thing to check out. We have another comment about the role of sports in belonging, and I know, Suzanne, this is near and dear to your heart. So if you wanna take a swing at this one, pun intended?
Suzanne Rivera: Yeah. I should say at the outset, I was an athlete as a kid, and both of my children, who are now grown, were athletes when they were growing up. My spouse was an athlete. So we just enjoy sport in my family anyway. But I also am a huge believer that part of what we're doing in higher education is not merely preparing students for employability, but really attending to their character and their wellbeing and their spirit, however they define that too. And I think athletics are a perfect venue for attending to mind, body, and spirit and building a sense of community even for non-athletes. They're a source of pride for the institution. They're a reason that many people would wear the T-shirt with their institution's name on it, to Jeff's earlier point about how many people on your campus are wearing swag that celebrates your institution. We know empirically that students are more likely to apply to a school that has athletic programs because they see them symbolically as representing a sense of school spirit and pride. Specifically, we know that male identified students are more likely to attend a school that has a football team, even if they don't play football because of the sense of pride that is created there, at least in the United States. We have a very particular marriage of athletics and academics in our higher ed system that is unique. And you don't see it everywhere around the world. So one of the things that I've done, I'm at a Division III school, meaning that athletes who come here are not coming for scholarships. They're coming purely for their love of the game, and they come knowing that we expect them to be scholars first and athletes second. But still, about 25% of our students are varsity athletes. So in some ways, they're the largest subculture of our campus are the athletes. And our athletic director is a great community builder, and he recognizes that the stadium and the gym sometimes are the most diverse spaces on our entire campus, because when you look around the room at who's cheering, you can see every single nook and cranny of our campus represented in the room, and we really try to foster joy in those environments. Joy is essential to building a sense of connection. You will see me as the president out there with the T-shirt cannon shooting T-shirts into the crowd. You'll see me taking selfies with our mascot. I'm frequently cheering with pom-poms at games and congratulating teams and athletes when they've had wins, but also consoling them and telling them they did a great job and I appreciated their effort when they don't get the result they want. Because there's a lot to be learned actually that will help you in life especially from team sports, where it's important for you to collaborate with folks with whom you might not otherwise be in relationship. But you have to build deep trust, and I think the symbolism of that becomes infectious and can spread through your whole campus. So I'm a huge proponent of athletics, not only for the sake of physical fitness and wellbeing, but for the sense of of esprit de corps of teamwork writ large for the whole campus that sports can create.
Elliot Felix: That's really great. And I, that, that resonates so much with me, and it also made me think of something we maybe could have gotten to in the first question but didn't. And James, this is a kind of a follow-up for you, because when you were talking about the planning the space where people see themselves, I think one of the things that I think is so interesting about that is part of your spaces are also simulating or they're looking to a professional environment, right? You've got a newsroom at Annenberg that's like students will encounter when they're in the workforce, and part of how they find that identification or they find that belonging is in that environment. And I know you've done some really could you talk about the Annenberg Insights project, where you're connecting the coursework and the career path? 'Cause I think that's, you've done some really interesting stuff on that.
James Vasquez: Yeah. A number of years ago our dean, Willow Bay, ended up... she came up with the idea of further developing our career mentorship programming and it actually it's now in a place that it's, in another 10X past where we thought it was going to be. And the idea was how do we connect curriculum with the outcomes associated with professional placement? So we said, "We know that there's students that are in jobs that our current students want. How do they get to those jobs?" That's one element to traditional career services. But the other element is what did they do when they were in school? And so we went and we're, we mapped out the connectivity between the classes that they took throughout their four or if a two-year program and master's program, and we identified where they are at and we tried to, we identified commonalities, and this is, this is our big data push that we've done in the last... and it's under the Salesforce platform. But it allows you to go out, put, take data, mostly from LinkedIn, some other sources, identify our alumni, where are they at, have them do surveys, connect that back to the data that we have in reference to classes, curriculum, syllabi, and we identify specific classes and specific skill sets to say, "If you want to land in this particular role, here's what you should do as part of that process." And it isn't just a matter of the classes, the content, it's also internships, experiences, going back to the newsroom. Some students that want to work in a production environment, like what classes they take, what programming did they actually be engaged in as an undergraduate student, and at the end of it, as we're, career counseling our students, we're saying, "You want to get in this direction, here's a pathway for you to make that happen." It's a very personalized experience- a lot of wonderful effort, a lot of wonderful teams engaged, a continuous improvement in the sense of how the system's designed, but also more importantly, continual focus from our advisement team, our career teams, just being the connect and also on, on our alumni side of the house, connecting the dots of where our students are at today, and then that direct communication on a daily basis with our current student population. There's a lot that's there and Dean Bay and then our CIO of the school have done a number of presentations at Salesforce conferences et cetera, just to talking about how this has played out for our students. We're actually in year four. The reality on the data is that as we get down, a couple years down the road, things become a little clearer on the success, but to date, we've been very happy about the outcomes.
Elliot Felix: It's really great and I love making those connections and it's not just the environment, but it's also the engagement and the classes and the conferences and the internships and it's, it's another way that people find their people.
Jeff Doyle: One of the things I've noticed over the years is that, it's like a tragedy of the commons. We're all focused on getting offices for people but we often don't think about where are the students gonna hang out. And I would say ask yourself where the benches are on campus. Like at one university I was at, I just went out and said, "We're gonna take a portion of our budget and spend it on putting benches outside the front entrance," 'cause people stand there, but they can't sit and talk there. At another school, we had a f- like five or six campus swings, and I added 10 additional campus swings over the years. And some people would call us and say, "We want a campus swing in at our own house," 'cause it meant so much. That's where we met someone we didn't know. And I walked through one of the student unions at UT recently, and there were... almost every seat in there was filled with students. And I'm like, thank goodness we put seating in there. And so just ask yourself, if you want students to build connection, where are you providing spaces for them to do that in a comfortable way,
Elliot Felix: yeah, that's a great point. It's not uncommon that I'll walk into a facility and you see some spaces that are empty, and then you see others where students are sitting on the floor with their laptop or huddled around an outlet, like it's the kind of campfire. And we can, we can do better.
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Elliot Felix: As we do better let's look to the future. And I would love, Suzanne, to hear from you you don't have to have the perfect crystal ball, but, help us see around corners a little bit and what's changing about how we build belonging and community to help us stay ahead of the curve.
Suzanne Rivera: The first thing I would say is, before I start thinking about the future, I wanna ask us to look back on the past, how the academy was formed and who it was formed for. The, essentially what we have are the vestiges of medieval guilds in our academic departments right now. We work at institutions, most of which were created to educate the sons of landowners in the United States, most of whom had something to do with agricultural industry. So actually our semesters are based on when to plant and when to reap. There are a lot of things about the academy that were created to serve a particular group of people who are not our main customers anymore, or they're not the only people we serve. And so I think when we think about what could change with regard to belonging, we need to be really honest about the fact that these institutions were not created for the people who populate them now. So we have to be really clear-eyed about how we prepare ourselves to serve the students of tomorrow. Not asking the question, will students be ready for us, but rather, how will we be ready for them? How will we be ready to serve them well, meeting them where they're at? And I think that requires, for example, confronting the existence of a hidden curriculum of higher education that for people who, I loved hearing Jeff talk about growing up on college campuses. My own children also grew up on college campuses, and their experience of going off to college was so much different than mine because I'm I was raised in an immigrant family on public assistance. I went to college on a Pell Grant, so when I showed up at a college campus, I didn't understand the hidden curriculum at all. I didn't know what a provost was or a bursar was. I didn't know what office hours were about. There was just a lot about it that was foreign and alienating to me. So I think how we could think about belonging going forward, how it's changing, is for us to acknowledge the ways in which we need to adjust the academy to be more welcoming so it literally is a place where more people can belong. Not just grit their teeth and tolerate it and persevere to graduate, but really feel a deep sense of flourishing when they're with us for those four years. And the other thing I would say about that is I've really taken to explicitly talking to students at convocation and orientation, both being vulnerable about my own journey in higher education so they can see that not everybody around them was born to it. But also talking to them about the fact that the word belonging actually has two senses We sometimes talk about belonging like whether a person feels they belong at a place, like they're welcome at that place or they fit into that place. But the other sense of the word belonging is that this place belongs to the members of this community. So they sh- to really belong, you should have a sense of ownership about the place. Macalester belongs to the students who are here. They belong to our 30,000 alumni around the world. And so when you feel that something belongs to you, you feel really invested in it, and you want it to be the best version of itself it can be. And so then when people are really feeling both senses of that word belonging, both I am welcome here and I am a part of this community, I legitimately deserve to be here. Also this place belongs to me. I have something to say about it. I legitimately have feedback about whether it's serving me well, and I have suggestions about how it could do better. Then I think what we're gonna see really are evolving models for how to amplify senses of belonging that will employ different methods, different platforms, depending on the nature of the place. Is it a large land grant institution with 62,000 students where they really have to work hard to find smaller niches of belonging? Is it a tiny liberal arts college where everyone knows each other and the professors all go by their first name? What region of the country is it in? Is it in an urban setting, or is it out in the middle of a corn field? All of these things are going to impact what methods or approaches are used to amplify a sense of belonging. And then the last thing I would say is coming back to Dr. Strayhorn's definition of belonging, I really was struck by his use of the word mattering in that definition. We know from developmental psychology that mattering is so important in late adolescence. It's a huge source of self-esteem and there's also really important work done by people like Professor Greg Elliott at Brown University on the importance of mattering. Putting students in charge of creating their own sense of belonging is actually a way to amplify belonging, because when they feel that their ideas matter and are being taken seriously, then they will feel more invested in the outcome, and that becomes a virtuous circle.
Elliot Felix: I love all that, and it, you actually proactively answered one of our questions about, inclusive of who or whom and how that's changing and how we're thinking about, the post-traditional learner into the future. James, Jeff, what does your crystal ball tell you about belonging?
James Vasquez: The, I think there's quite a few changes that have taken place. Actually, and Jeff actually touched on something that I think it's something near and dear to my heart. I'm responsible for space planning and pre-pandemic, one of the key things that we always faced with is faculty wanting to move to new offices, right? One of the biggest things that took place, that has gone to zero. It is, it's not an important priority post-pandemic, and it's really a reflection of the type of change that have taken place in everybody's attitude across the campus community and the priorities associated with that pre-pandemic to post-pandemic. And as we're thinking about this it is dealing with the atmosphere, at least in our campus environment, of having a lot of remote connectivity, and it's not necessarily classes, but staff, students, et cetera. Those are the things that are really some of the more challenging, especially because we don't focus primarily on, on remote, hybrid learning. It's like it is on-prem, physical, we want the face-to-face connectivity. But you're trying to balance that out with the demand and the need for virtual connectivity, which is, which I think is the biggest challenge I actually see ahead of us is trying to navigate the, where the students are at today, and it's going back to what Sue was saying, go, where are they at today? There's a virtual component to it, and how do you balance that with the physical component that we all know is critical to our communication development in the community overall? Where, what's the balance there? I don't know, but I think that the dynamics have changed significant enough that we're taking a step back and trying to reassess where do we focus, how do we engage, and what's the best way to engage? But we have to change our thought process, not only about how we're recruiting, admitting, but also in the classroom and then the post connectivity.
Jeff Doyle: Those are great thoughts. I learned a lot from listening to both of you. Where my mind initially went to on this was that studying retention software, which I spent a lot of time on last summer. A lot of them are implementing these chatbots where they might take the school mascot and have it talk to you using AI, or they might pre-program messages that do things to make you feel connected and you belong. And those, as I study the research on this, the long-term research on the impact of that isn't there yet. I do think that it shows that they can reduce some feelings of loneliness, and I was thinking this morning driving in about this and how we used to talk when I was a kid about having imaginary friends or like I was talking to my dog this morning about its day and what it was gonna do without me. And so in some ways, we-- it, this isn't new. We have things in our lives that we talk to that make us feel better. But in the long run, I think some of these instruments that are making a lot of money selling these automated chats are short-term fixes. Hopefully, they're long-term fixes, but I don't know that they are. Don't get me wrong, my dog makes me feel good. But at the end of the day, it, I want people around me that care about me. And so I think we gotta be careful, as we're cutting staff due to budget cuts and reducing faculty-student ratios. One of the things I did at Baylor was we had 180, I think, full-time staff. And I said, "If every one of us impacts 20 people, multiply that by 180, it's still not enough students to make them feel like they belong." And so we really worked on what we called peer leadership programs. So we ended up creating like eight different peer health educators, peer diversity educators, peer faith educators, peer whatever educators physical fitness educators. And we had students that were taking classes as part of leadership minor that I oversaw. We ended up with 200 something people in a leadership minor taking classes on how to impact their peers. I'd rather go in that direction in terms of having human-to-human scalable impact than using some of these chatbots, which I still think there's a place for them on the short term. But long term, I think quality, depth of relationship. There's gonna be a tide that turns back to that, and people are gonna realize there's only so much sense of belonging I can have by talking to a bot.
Suzanne Rivera: Jeff, one thing that you just made me think of is in some ways the opposite of belonging is getting more airplay right now, which is divisiveness, anger, canceling, threatening, literal violence. It coming out of the two years of disconnection that we experienced because of the crisis phase of the COVID pandemic, I think people are, including students, are craving genuine human connection. So while bots can be helpful to get you an answer to your question at 2:00 in the morning that you don't wanna wait for a human to answer your call at 9:00 the next day, what they don't provide is looking across a table at someone else and noticing that their brow is furrowed when they're answering your question and saying, "Hey, are you okay?" Picking up on all the non-verbal cues. And the problem we have is scale, right? You just put your finger on it. What does it take for us to have that genuine human connection when we're looking across at each other? And I think this is a little bit why we're experiencing so much vitriol and anger right now. The way that people are using social media makes it really easy to fire off a nasty email or a sick burn in a tweet or something like that to score points because you don't see the consequences of your words when you're not right across the table from somebody. So I think while bots are going to have a purpose, just like all technology has a purpose, you can use it for good or you can use it for ill. I think that for real belonging, we need to create opportunities even though the scale is a challenge for real human connection. We know that students crave it. Those precious in-person minutes together, whether in the classroom or on the playing surface, or in a music jam, or a poetry slam, or w- or a protest where actual human beings are together, I think really is where the magic happens.
Jeff Doyle: Yeah. The, one of the departments that I oversee here I'm just learning about it, but basically we have a 24/7 phone line and online where you can submit any student anyone's worried about, anyone in the world, like sometimes parents or people in other countries chatting on a Discord server. And then I have eight case managers who each have cases of several hundred students that they're monitoring and reaching out to check in on these students and say, "Hey, we heard that maybe something's not going well." And they have a protocol, like 30 different protocols for different issues, and I'm like, "This is revolutionary. I love it." And it's in-person connection.
Elliot Felix: That's amazing. And my hope is these things don't have to compete but they can collaborate, right? The technology can free up time to enable more human connection. Or one of the things in the book is, like, how do you combine high tech and high touch, right? Tech can help you focus also. It can offload some work, but it can also help you do the intrusive advising or whatever it might be. We have one final question that I'll take a quick swing at and then wrap us up, but we have... And if there's time for others to weigh in, please. But ways to build belonging for remote learners, and I have some quick thoughts that'll allow you all to gather yours, but I think sometimes it's about the intentional instructional design. If you're a hybrid classroom is the hardest environment to teach in, right? 'Cause you're doing three things at once. You've got in person, you've got remote, and you've got the technology connecting the two. Sometimes you forget about the people that are remote, or sometimes it's set up so they're like second class and they're looking in to what's happening in the room. But if you can have good video, if you can have good audio, and you can have the right instructional design that can help, I think, certainly breaking down the scale. So you're creating small breakout groups, smaller scale conversations. I think Suzanne's idea about ownership is really great. If remote learners are in charge of a certain discussion topic, a certain discussion section, a certain student organization, whatever it might be, because ownership builds, builds belonging. Those are some quick thoughts. And in our last couple minutes here, I just wanna say this is the fifth Connected College webinar sharing the insights and ideas from contributors. We've got a little library here that folks can draw on. You can find these all under my profile if that's easiest. One about connecting coursework and careers, another about gathering and analyzing data to make better decisions, another one about becoming a health-promoting institution and really diving deeply on health and wellness. So lots of great resources out there, and "The Connected College" itself is a great resource. You can find it on Amazon, you can find it on my website, elliotfelix.com, and hear more from all the great folks we heard from heard from today. And it is a evidence-based, encouraging playbook for breaking down silos so that students succeed. And I wish everybody the best of luck on that student success journey. And we know that belonging, it plays such a huge part of it. And thanks for all the great comments. And thanks to our panelists. Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to Elliot felix.com for more information about my book, the Connected College articles I've written and talks I've given. There's also tools you can download information on upcoming events and information on booking me to speak at your institution or organization. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.