What does it mean to belong on campus?

For some students, it will look like achieving exemplary grades in the classroom, unlocking the opportunity to follow their academic dreams. For others, it could mean falling into a strong friend group with the help of a student organization or athletic team. It can be as grand as participating in the school’s marching band or as granular as finding a place to play piano as you did at home. But in all these cases, it’s about meeting the needs that you enter an institution in thoughtful and authentic ways.

A Multifaceted Model of Belonging

Maghsoodi, Ruedas-Gracia, and Jiang (2023) acknowledge a significant challenge in defining a sense of belonging on campus: semantics.They note, “Some [psychologists] focus on perceived social acceptance (Goodenow, 1993) while others include a sense of classroom comfort (Hoffman et al., 2002). Moreover, some studies treat belongingness as the opposite of experiencing uncertainty about one’s belonging (Talaifar et al., 2021), while others treat these two as distinct constructs (Walton & Cohen, 2011).”

Sense of belonging is more than just feeling seen, understood, and accepted based on identity—although these feelings heavily affect the social facet of belonging. It also feels as though the institution's fabric is woven with you and your success in mind (institutional belonging) and as though you can achieve your academic goals while there (academic belonging).

We aspire to put it simply: sense of belonging, along all these dimensions, is a psychological sense of identification and affiliation with a community.

At Mentor Collective, we’re constantly exploring how these factors work in concert with one another and how they can help institutions and their students alike achieve the goals they’ve set for themselves. What we’ve come to learn is that sense of belonging is all of these things. 

Tinto (2017) made a strong case for these three facets of belonging as central to fueling student motivation. Summarizing the thrust of the diagram, Beatson, et. al. (2023) conclude, “Each of these variables can be a key driver of an individual student's motivation level, which in turn drives their ability to continue/persist in their degree completion.

Source: An examination of self-efficacy and sense of belonging on accounting student achievement 

With a slight adjustment to the model, we at Mentor Collective offer that these three dimensions of belonging can motivate a student toward any goal they set—retention, yes, but also smaller goals along the way, like passing a difficult class, landing an internship, or being elected to a desired leadership role.

Source: An examination of self-efficacy and sense of belonging on accounting student achievement 

For a student, the model might play out like this:

Molly, a first-generation student majoring in chemistry finds the support she needs early to succeed academically in her first semester, when she at first struggles with organic chemistry - before making time in her schedule to attend regular tutoring sessions. She meets other students who are passionate about this course of study, and eventually joins the Chemistry Club. In addition to planning several “study breaks” for fellow students in her major, the club helps her make connections to the larger field of chemistry through guest lecturers, themed film nights, and collaboration with faculty on research projects. 

By the end of her first full year, Molly feels certain she’ll continue at the institution - thanks to a set of like-minded friends, a sense of connection to her school, and some clarity on how her classes will factor into her future.

While we hope this sequence of events will happen for every student who embarks upon a college experience, hope alone cannot ensure it does. Institutions must take action and ensure that experiences like Molly’s aren’t just possible but likely. For Molly, the interactions that led her to meaningful campus involvement were incidental. 

One of those actions can be to implement a scalable peer mentorship program.

Peer mentorship, when guided by a student’s preferences for a mentor and delivered upon by an institution’s widespread mentor recruitment efforts, can connect students with trained and identity-aligned sources of support. For example, a mentor might hear from a mentee that they’re concerned about being able to stay enrolled for financial reasons. Our "early alert system" allows the mentor to “raise” a flag about financial concerns, signaling that they need help supporting their mentee.

Transparency on the Path to Belonging

Institutions remain largely unaware of how students are thinking about, feeling about, and moving through their college experience. With a structured and intentional mentorship program, students are afforded multiple opportunities to report their behaviors, challenges, and needs. This information can be assessed and acted upon in real-time, helping students feel heard and helping administrators direct their time and energy productively.

Our Participant Dashboard offers administrators insight into all stages of this process, from a look at what goals mentees are pursuing, to what challenges they may be encountering along the way (by way of our Flags feature), to how accomplished they are feeling (by way of our Assessments feature and Dashboard tab). With the data presented here, institutions can see stories like Molly’s play out in real time, intervene when stories like Molly’s are having trouble materializing, and ultimately ensure that every student has the opportunity to feel like a part of the campus community.

Feature Spotlight: Goals

As we mentioned, students can feel motivated to work toward their goals when academic, institutional, and social belonging is present. Our Goals feature has built mentee goals into the mentorship experience. 

When prospective mentees in Student Success programs complete their initial matching survey, they can identify traits they’d like to see in their prospective mentor and what goal they’d like that mentor to support them with. As with belonging, goals can be academic (“succeed in my classes”, “get an internship”), social (“make friends,” “get involved in campus events, clubs, and/or other organizations”), or institutional (“learn how to navigate campus services,” “learn more about financial aid and/or scholarships”). 

Once the mentor and mentee are matched, they can structure their meetings or other touchpoints around pursuing that goal. We support these conversations with a library of resources available on the Participant Dashboard and sortable by mentee goal. If a mentor needs to learn more about a topic to support their mentee, this compilation of over forty guides can help them hold these conversations in an informed and interactive way.

Explore the influence of the Goals feature on the student dashboard and see how it enhances the mentorship experience. 

By creating an avenue for students to set goals and a mechanism for creating a plan for their achievement, we aim to harness that hard-earned motivation into observable and commendable success productively.

Want to learn more about how Mentor Collective’s software, resources, and training can increase resource utilization - and, by extension, belonging - on your campus? Let our team show you these features in action with a product demo.