Listen On
How can higher education leaders measure student belonging, and what specific strategies directly boost retention? How can colleges and universities use their facilities, programming, communications, traditions, and more to shape a student's sense of belonging? In this bonus episode originally presented at NASPA’s Student Success in Higher Education Conference, Jeff Doyle and Elliot Felix tackle these questions. This episode examines national retention data, early pulse survey metrics, actionable frameworks, and practical strategies to help leaders break down campus silos, design inclusive student spaces, and leverage peer connections to drive long-term degree completion.
Building Belonging in Higher Education: A Practical Framework for Student Success
Creating a genuine sense of belonging on campus is one of the most powerful ways to drive higher education student success, retention, and graduation rates. When students feel supported, valued, and connected to a campus community, they are far more likely to persist through academic and social challenges. But how can you measure it and improve it? Jeff Doyle and Elliot Felix discuss these in this episode, originally presented at NASPA’s Student Success in Higher Education Conference. Drawing from national data, evidence-based campus interventions, and student retention research, higher education administrators can implement actionable strategies to cultivate belonging across physical, digital, and interpersonal environments.
The National Landscape of Student Belonging
National datasets provide a clear picture of how student belonging directly impacts key retention and graduation metrics. According to the National College Health Assessment, approximately 70.5% of surveyed students report feeling that they belong at their institution. Similarly, longitudinal data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) indicates that 77% to 80% of students feel valued, comfortable being themselves, and part of their campus community.
However, belonging metrics vary across specific student populations:
Transfer Students: Report 4% lower sense of belonging than non-transfer peers.
Part-Time Students: Report 5% lower sense of belonging than full-time peers.
Off-Campus Commuters: Report 8% lower sense of belonging than on-campus residents.
Quantifying belonging matters because it directly predicts long-term success. Students with a strong sense of belonging are 41% more likely to persist from their first to second year. Furthermore, research demonstrates that a single one-point increase on a five-point belonging scale correlates with a 3.4 percentage point increase in graduation rates. Additionally, early pulse surveys conducted during weeks three to six of the semester reveal that students who strongly disagree that they belong are five times more likely to stop out ten months later compared to their peers.
Five Key Strategies to Foster Campus Belonging
Higher education leaders can implement five core strategies to cultivate belonging across campus environments:
1. Elevate Identity and Affinity Spaces: Identity and affinity group spaces—such as Asian student centers, LGBTQ+ centers, and multicultural spaces—frequently record lower satisfaction rates when relegated to isolated or outdated facilities. Updating, centralizing, and properly resourcing these spaces helps students find their community through a dedicated physical environment.
2. Strengthen the First-Year Experience: The first-year transition offers a critical window for building early connections through specialized programming, orientation camps, mentoring, and first-year seminars. Extended orientation traditions and peer-led introductions build early institutional pride and social integration before classes begin.
3. Eliminate Digital Sprawl and Unmask the Hidden Curriculum: Services, support resources, and involvement opportunities are frequently spread across disconnected physical and digital environments, creating confusion for students navigating campus systems. Implementing unified student portals centralizes access to resources, unmasks the hidden curriculum, and simplifies support access, directly improving multi-year retention rates.
4. Integrate Academic Support into Everyday Student Spaces: Co-locating academic and co-curricular support services—such as tutoring, writing assistance, career advising, and financial aid—within high-traffic student hubs like the library normalizes help-seeking behavior. Integrating support alongside study space removes social stigma and makes receiving assistance a routine part of the student experience.
5. Empower Student Ownership and Peer Leadership: Providing students with direct ownership over campus space programming, student-run enterprises, and peer involvement advising deepens institutional investment. Programs that employ student involvement advisors or offer financial aid tied to high-impact practices significantly boost engagement and success rates among underrepresented and low-income students.
The Doyle Sense of Belonging Inventory
The Doyle Sense of Belonging Inventory posits that measuring and improving belonging requires evaluating five foundational pillars:
Institutional Identification: Understanding institutional traditions, history, and feeling proud to be part of the campus identity.
Social Acceptance: Feeling welcomed, valued, and visually represented across campus environments and leadership.
Social Capital: Possessing the navigational knowledge, resources, and institutional support needed to succeed.
Connections to Faculty and Staff: Developing meaningful relationships with faculty and staff members who demonstrate genuine care for student well-being.
Peer Connections: Building strong friendships, participating in student organizations, and engaging in collaborative learning opportunities.
By systematically measuring these pillars and deploying targeted interventions, higher education leaders can build connected colleges where all students thrive.
Episode 130 Transcript
-
Elliot Felix: This is a special bonus episode of the Connected College podcast, recorded in June 2026 at the NASPA Student Success in Higher Education Conference. Jeff Doyle from Marymount University and I tag-teamed this deep dive on belonging. I shared some national context on belonging with definitions and trends, and then provided five ways that you can increase it. Then Jeff offered his Sense of Belonging Inventory, a framework that's drawn from his experience and a broad review of literature, and we talked through it with the audience in Austin. It's linked in the show notes. For this podcast, I've focused on our two presentation portions and cut out the discussions which had poor audio and would be hard to follow. 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.
Jeff Doyle: All right, folks, we'll go ahead and get started. Good to have you here. I'm Jeff. I'm from Austin currently, but I actually just accepted a new job, so I'm moving actually up to DC and I'm moving up in August, but I'll be remote this summer working for strategic planning, accreditation, and assessment for a university up in the DC area. But we're excited to share a little bit about ourselves. I'm originally from Maryland. My father taught at an HBCU there for 30 years. Went to school in Virginia, several degrees there. Worked in North Carolina up in the mountains, upstate. Was at Baylor for 12 years, 10 of them as a dean of students, and currently at UT. Spent a little time at SMU and a couple schools. And then my excellent partner here, famous author, will introduce himself.
Elliot Felix: Excited to be here. My name's Elliot Felix. I'm the author of a book called "The Connected College," which is an encouraging evidence-based playbook for breaking down silos so that students succeed. And I'm really excited for this tag team because I'm gonna kinda go a bit more broad and national and share some of the things I'm seeing working with 100 or so colleges and universities, and helping more than a million students. And Jeff's gonna go deep on his sense of belonging inventory and all his experience. It's really exciting to bring these different perspectives together, going broad and deep, going national and local, quantitative, qualitative, and we hope you come away with a great picture of how to measure and improve belonging in all its many facets. So just to get us started, where or when have you felt most like you belonged? The library. I love the library as first out of the gate. Thank you. Church, LGBTQ+ center, home, family, sporting events, lounges. Affinity groups, outdoors summer camp. And I think one of the interesting things, we have some things gravitating toward the center, right? Family, home, work. But there's also a lot of things on the perimeter that are occurring maybe a little less frequently, but are just as important because we all find belonging in our own way.
-
Elliot Felix: Gonna keep us moving here and just offer a national perspective and it comes from my work with 120 or so colleges and universities. Of course, they're all a little bit different, the campus, the curriculum, the culture, but there are some common threads, and I'm excited to share some of the data, some of the examples really to tee up Jeff, as we go into detail. It's great to have a working definition of belonging. There are many of them, but I like Dr. Strayhorn's from College Student Sense of Belonging. He's really talking about a sense that you're feeling supported, that you matter, that you're cared about, you're respected, you're accepted, and you're part of something. You're part of a campus community. It's great to level set and use that as our baseline.
Of course what's measured gets managed, and so it's also important to have things like metrics and translate those ideas into numbers. One of the great studies of this, the National College Health Assessment, is a pretty big data set that's tens of thousands of students every year. They ask very directly, agree, disagree, "I feel that I belong at my college or university." That's a very direct way of going at it. About 70 and a half percent agree in the latest survey so we're almost back to pre-COVID levels. Another way to think about this and another way to ask about this is NSSE which is the National Survey of Student Engagement. They have been doing amazing longitudinal work. And they asked about belonging, and they broke it down into three categories: "I feel comfortable being myself," "I feel valued," "I feel like part of the community." And some interesting findings, generally 77 to 80% agreed with those statements, but interestingly, there were some differences, about 4% less if you were a transfer student, about 5% less if you were a part-time student, about 8% less if you're living off campus. So maybe these all seem fairly intuitive, but it's nice to be able to quantify our intuition every once in a while.
We also know that when students feel like they belong, they're more likely to persist and to graduate. That same NSSE survey found forty-one percent more likely to continue first to second year. And a great study by Brady and Gopalan found, if you move the needle on belonging one point along a five-point Likert scale that's actually three point four percentage points higher grad rate. So there's some direct impact there. So with that national context belonging is critical. It's maybe hard to measure. Those measures don't always agree but are looking reasonably good.
-
Elliot Felix: Now let's think about five things you can do. And these are drawn again, from my experience. My first book, How to Get the Most Out of College, is basically how do students succeed in college, and the second one is how can we help students succeed. They go together. I think you're seeing the pairing there. And five things that I've seen work really well: one, really think about identity and affinity group spaces. And of course, these are spaces that are open to all and welcome to all but maybe focused on certain populations and helping people find their people through a place. And the space on campus that has the lowest satisfaction consistently is identity and affinity group spaces. Often 'cause they're like relegated to campus edges. They're stuffed in the basement. They've got reused furniture from somebody's attic or whatever it is. These small spaces can make a big difference. Emory actually did a great campaign. They called it their Identity Spaces Project to systematically revamp these, like the Asian Student Center, the LGBTQ+ Center and it made a big difference.
The other thing you can do is really think about the first year experience. The first year experience, I think, is one of these great opportunities to build belonging through spaces, through activities, through programming, through mentoring, if for no other reason than US News is now ranking first year experience. So it's something that we all knew mattered but it's something now that students and families and parents are looking at specifically and maybe it's Elon or Agnes Scott or University of South Carolina at the top. There's also a great resource for this. University of South Carolina, who invented the first year seminar, they do a conference every year, the First Year Experience Conference. Has anybody been to that conference? That's a really good way to zoom in on the first year experience.
The other thing is to think about how you break down those barriers to increase access to information, unmask the hidden curriculum, give students more access to social capital information and each other. Campus portals, student portals play an increasingly important role in that because services, people, support, increasingly, they're digitally and physically spread out. How many people have heard the term digital sprawl? It's really becoming a thing because as staff and as students, you have way too many different platforms to help you. You get confused. You can't navigate. How do I log in? And so you're offering all these amazing things. People may not use them. They may not know about them. The more you can bring them together digitally and physically in something like a portal like Portland State did, the better you can go. And actually Portland State, we did a whole research project to uncover this as one of the top barriers. And through that and other work, retention went up four percentage points in just a couple of years.
The other thing you can do is really look for opportunities to combine study and support, because on a lot of campuses, where students study, where they work together, where they work on projects is in a different place from where they get support, and that propagates the silos. It also can stigmatize getting support. Whereas if you think about the library, for instance, as something like a student success hub, and you have writing and tutoring in there, study abroad, and in this case at UVA, we have study abroad, we have financial aid, career, all these things, visiting on a flexible basis, doing collaborative programming, then you normalize getting help, right? And at one table you've got two students talking to each other, working on a project. The next table over, you've got a student talking to a peer mentor. The next table over, you've got a student talking to a writing coach. The next table over, you've got a student working with a tutor, right? And that can happen, and that's actually what's you're seeing in this picture. Not this kind of othering less than kind of experience, but this is what everybody does, and we do it in this place.
The final strategy, which is really great for building belonging, is building a sense of ownership over the spaces and how they're programmed. And that might be, for instance, a student group taking ownership over some of the programming that happens in an identity center or an affinity group space. It might be through student run enterprises. Quinnipiac does a great job with these student-run businesses that run restaurants, cafes, bars, juice bars. And those students, it's an experiential learning opportunity, it's also a belonging opportunity and it's a skill-building opportunity, so those are some things to think about both nationally and in terms of five things you can do.
And in order to hear your thoughts about those five things and set Jeff up for success, we're interested in hearing what you think is the most important factor. What do you think is the most important factor in belonging? Is it pride, identity, and affiliation? Is it feeling welcomed and valued? Is it access to networks and resources? Is it support, mentoring, and guidance? Seems like we have a lot of folks focusing on friendship, trust, and community, the peer connections. We have folks voting for the support and mentoring. But the big winner is feeling welcomed and valued.
-
Jeff Doyle: So thanks. Great. Elliot and I actually went to the same college, but the first time I ever met him in person was this morning. It was kinda funny. We were at the same school at the same time too. And the school we went to doesn't have seniors or third or juniors or anything. It's first, second, third, fourth, fifth. Like, when I graduated with my doctorate, it was my ninth year there, so I was a ninth-year student. Anyone know what school that is? University of Virginia. So Jefferson said, "You're never a senior in learning." You're always another year to learn. We're always growing and learning.
I'm a big data guy. My father taught biology, botany. I was taking math in high school, like calc one, two, and three, and so I was like we should be able to figure out what leads to student success better. So we started out with 100 variables and I worked with the associate vice president for academic affairs. And each year we studied, then we worked with institutional research, and we looked at the fall-to-fall retention to see which variables were most predictive. And of course, first semester GPA is a big one, right? But it's a lagging indicator. By the time you get first semester GPA, most of them made the decision on whether they're gonna stay or not, right? So what we found, and I went to a couple sessions on this. One of them I couldn't get in 'cause there were so many people, about pulse surveys. So we did a survey weeks three to six, 'cause the first two weeks is kinda like the honeymoon period. Everyone's still pretty happy. "Oh, it's gonna be great." And then it starts to sink in. They're getting up to that first test, and most don't... Back in my day, we used to say by the time they get to fall break, they've already decided if they're coming back or not. We almost proved that because, we asked this bunch of questions, and we identified those that were most predictive, but the one question that was more predictive than any other, it was five times more predictive than the next most predictive variable that we had, not just question. And that was, "Do you feel like you belong at this institution?" And if they said extremely disagree, they were five times more likely not to retain 10 months later. And so then it was, okay, what are we going to do about this, and how do you create a sense of belonging in a college? Because knowing that's one thing, changing it... we can't just tell people they belong, right? We have to help them feel that way.
So sense of belonging. I just decided last summer, I had some time, and I was like, "I'm gonna read more about this." So I read some pieces here. You can look up these if you want. There's research out there on belonging. Strayhorn had a definition. But I was like, "I really wanna think through this myself and what makes sense." I've been around long enough to know I can have some thoughts on my own, so maybe I should read and put something together that makes sense. So I put together this model. So I felt a fun way of teaching it would be to see, if we can't figure out, this is what they call, I think, content validity. So if you were to say, these are questions from the survey, "I know what I need to do well here," which of these would you say fits with that? I know what I need to do well. Any thoughts? I have some social capital, right? Okay. I am involved in a student group. Peer connections, good. I belong at this institution. Institutional identification, right? I get along with other students here. Social acceptance. Good, all right, so that gives you an idea of these five areas that I came up with.
So when we found out at Baylor that people didn't feel like belonged, we studied who is that? And we found out that a number of them were students of color, in particular women, African American students didn't feel like they belonged. So we went and interviewed the people who said they didn't feel like they belonged but they stayed. 'Cause we could talk to them, it was like, "What changed for you?" And so they talked about finding identity groups, connections, all these five things. Faculty and staff reaching out to them. One of the things we found out was that they said that the student union, which is very historic at Baylor, has a bunch of framed beautiful pictures of legendary white men who were part of the university since its founding in 1845, right? And they're like, "I don't feel at home in the student union, at least on floors three and four." And so it was like, wow, that's interesting. What could we do about that? Another one we found out was that all the Greek groups had access to a lot of money. If you were a non-Greek group and you needed money, you had to go to student government. If you went to student government, guess what you had to do? You had to dress up really nicely, first of all, 'cause they're very high on themselves. And you had to know Robert's Rules of Order, right? 'Cause that's how you get a bill through. So I don't know how many of you wanna dress up and use Robert Rules of Order to ask money for your student org, but it was intimidating to a number of folks. So we actually just took several hundred thousand dollars and said, "This is available for any affinity group that wants to request it for funds, and we'll try to lower the bar on getting access to it."
All right, so what can we do with these five areas? So I'll just give you some ideas. Obviously orientation was one of the other variables that we found at Baylor that had a big impact, especially extended orientation. So Fish Camp at A&M, Lion Camp, Horned Frog Camp, it's a Texas thing, I think. I moved to Texas in 2010, but I'm like, "What is up with all these camps? This is crazy." But I'm like, A&M and Baylor and TCU have major fan bases. I'm like, they're-- We went to Fish Camp, which is the oldest extended orientation in the country, and they're like indoctrination in the best way possible, I was like, "Now I know why they stand up the whole football game," because they learn all these cheers and chants, and they're told, "You will be an Aggie for the rest of your life. When you die, we will celebrate," "not that you died, but that you were an Aggie." And now Baylor does something similar. So orientation, where you teach students about who you are. Traditions. When I was dean, we helped put that together. I was a small part of that. We redid Fifth Street through town, which is where homecoming parade goes. We have the oldest homecoming in the country. And every so many steps, we put in a tradition. So we identified the ten biggest traditions, and we put in a year and what the tradition was. And so as you're walking up and down the street, you learn the major traditions of the university. And then sports, at Baylor, all the freshmen run across the middle of the field. Not the seniors, not the juniors, not... If you're an incoming student, it's your first year, you get to run across the middle of the football field for the first game, and it's called the Baylor Line. It's, you're becoming a part of this extended legacy of becoming the line. So involving students in sports, not just going to varsity events, but how do you connect them and plug them in?
Social acceptance. Telling people you belong here. When you're at convocation, I identified, like knowing the groups that were most likely, least likely to succeed, I went and identified students and instead of just having the president and the vice presidents talking at convocation, which is, 5,000 people coming, all the new students, I want these students on the stage if possible. I handpicked my students and they're like, "I've never talked in front of this many people before." And I was like your message is gonna be hugely important." And students said, "It was so neat to see someone that looked like me on the stage telling me I didn't think I would fit in here at the start, but now I do. And this is what I did to do that." That was so much more powerful than a legacy person like me telling them what they needed to do. Inclusion-focused programming. Okay, we've mentioned some of that, but what do we do to help people feel like, even legally, when in some states you can't do a lot of this, how do we create spaces to make this happen? And then educating on civil disagreement is another one. So how do we create space to talk about things we disagree with?
Social capital, how do we do that? So giving first-gen students, Elliot and I presented earlier on what we can do with that, during COVID, I volunteered to be in charge of all the online students in the fall of 2020, 2,000 of them at Baylor, many of them in other countries. And they just, they didn't make it to our country 'cause we wouldn't let them in because of the COVID thing. The vaccine wasn't out. And so I would meet with 100 of them on Friday afternoons, and then we'd have an activity on Friday night, all virtual, And I'm thinking like, "How do I equip these students with what they need in other countries, Bangladesh or India or China, to help them succeed here?" And so thinking through what do we do to equip our students with the knowledge they need. There was an article published in around 2012 called Who Gets to Graduate. It was in The New York Times. It was featuring David Lauderman at University of Texas back then. But we went and met with him, and he basically said, "Every student that gets in here should graduate." We should believe, once they are admitted, they will graduate. There's no one we're trying to push out. And so I think that's an important message. And Elliot talked about this, making support intuitive and easy. So if you actually go back and look at his five things, they map to our, the model that we shared here, too. I was impressed that he did that. So kudos to Elliot.
Connections to faculty and staff, The very first presentation I ever made professionally was 1996. I looked back on it, and it was on how to connect faculty to students. And I remember we had a program called Dine with a Mind where we gave them a meal card, and any faculty member could check it out and take it and go have dinner or coffee or something with a student. So connecting faculty to students, getting them involved in research and recognizing. So one of the, that pulse survey, we also asked them, have you felt like one person at this university cared about you?" And if they said no, obviously, it's like we might wanna reach out to them. If they said yes, what do we ask next? Who was it? Who was it? So then we had awards, and we celebrated all these people. And then they were like, "Oh." I was like, "You want a letter in your tenure file?" They were like, "We would love that." So suddenly, all these faculty that had never been recognized for all the students they were helping were being celebrated across campus because all these students were saying the impact they had on them. So celebrating them.
And then the fifth one is connecting to their peers. How do you incentivize joining student orgs? One thing we did at Baylor was we created next to the Starbucks in the student union, a space called Created to Connect, the Student Involvement Center, and we hired students and taught them how to get students plugged into student orgs, and anybody could go meet. The same way you can meet with an academic advisor or career advisor, you could meet with a student involvement advisor and learn how to get plugged in. Thinking about how you design your housing to maximize friendship. As someone that worked in housing, there are ways to build spaces that provide some privacy, but also increase collision in the best way possible. We also did a program at one school where we gave out high impact practice scholarships. If they're involved in a HIP, they would get $3,000 a year, and we ended up publishing an article in the Journal of College Student Development. It's one of the first studies to show that you can link financial aid to engagement, not just grades, and it makes a difference. So we showed that low income students involved in these HIPs were more likely to be successful. And so we told the university, "Let's give more money to these high impact practices." So now we're moving to the next stage.
Elliot Felix: I'm really glad we didn't skip that activity because small group discussion in the classroom is a super important way to build belonging, right? Breaking down the scale, building those peer connections in the classroom, and so here we are walking the talk and by the way, there's a whole group of literature around what are called wise interventions, which are these kinds of small things. Something as, what seems seemingly as small as reading a paragraph that not feeling a sense of belonging right away is common and temporary. One study, one RCT trial showed actually a full point in GPA just from reading that paragraph. So pretty amazing stuff.
These are all such great ideas, and it's been great learning about this together. And Jeff and I wanna thank you for all your ideas and insights and energy. We're happy to answer more questions afterwards, and we hope you have a great conference. 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.
-
Elliot Felix: We've been talking about change as a meta skill and really an approach to creating these better connected programs that are with government, with community, K-12, across disciplines. As we wrap up, as you shine up your crystal ball and you think about change for folks that are trying to prepare students in the broadest possible definition of that—learners—for an uncertain future and careers that don't yet exist, how is that itself changing? And what advice do you have for institutions to adapt to change?
Lutalo Sanifu: Yeah, I think that we are the sandbox for that. Like, how are we figuring out what change looks like? We're still figuring out a lot of this stuff ourselves as we iterate, but one thing I have always told students is if you're doing the same thing as the person next to you, you are not the best applicant. Always find another thing that you can add on. Always learn something new. That change and learning should go together. It shouldn't be, "Oh, the world has changed and I'm where the world used to be." I know people who were nurses, and when computers came into the hospitals, they retired because they didn't understand how to use the computer in that hospital context. And then I know other people who learned and kept their career going and even were able to advance themselves into leadership roles because they understood the systems. It's really gonna come down to how do you position yourself to be the best? How do you do that? And part of that is being okay with knowing that you don't know everything, learning things, and then figuring out how is it applicable to your life.
Elliot Felix: At scale, having a sandbox, having a test bed or having this place where you can prototype the future is a key part of it. It comes back to Alan Kay, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." It seems like you are living every day as the sandbox, as you put it.
Lutalo Sanifu: That is exactly it. How do we design this new thing that didn't exist before? The Masters of Urban Technology, it's brand new. It doesn't exist anywhere else. We invented it. But the intersection between informatics and the built environment, being able to tell this is where there are a lot of traffic accidents and why based on the data, that is not what urban planning was when I was coming up. Things have evolved and changed and we should be the people that invents what that future looks like. So I'm really excited to be a part of this project. This could be my last stop in this career.
Elliot Felix: And no matter what, it's gonna always be changing, right?
Lutalo Sanifu: Of course.
Elliot Felix: Lutalo, thank you so much for a great conversation about change and in preparing students, careers, and ourselves for careers in a world that doesn't yet exist.
Lutalo Sanifu: It was a pleasure speaking with you, Elliot. Anytime.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to Elliotfelix.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.