In the social media era, you can look at a university’s Instagram feed and get the impression that every day rates a 10/10 and everyone belongs.

But Shannon Brady, a Wake Forest University psychology professor who studies the implications of social belonging, cautions you to look deeper. Smiles on faces and free hoodies emblazoned with the college logo don’t equal belonging. That comes from building relationships with peers and professors, taking full advantage of campus resources and feeling that you have the support needed to clear the inevitable hurdles.

Brady’s research has identified multiple implications for college belonging, including how a brief “social belonging” exercise had lasting positive effects for students and how personality can change a sense of belonging. 

Her most recent study, “College Students’ Sense of Belonging: A Graduation Update,” is the first to connect students’ sense of belonging in their first year of college to their likelihood to graduate. 

Here, she talks in depth about the results of that study and how colleges, students and families can use the findings.

Why do you study belonging? Why is it important?

I’m interested in the ways that students decide whether they belong or not in school, what contributes to that, and how we might be able to help students have experiences that allow them to have bad days without that tanking their belonging. More recently, I’ve been trying to just help us understand whether belonging is related to things like graduation. If we were to measure how much students feel like they belong when they first get to campus or the end of their first year, does that help us understand the likelihood they are to graduate four or six years later? If their belonging goes up from first year to their third year, does that positively predict the likelihood that they’re going to end up graduating on time or within six years?

Belonging is associated with a bunch of outcomes that we generally want for people: ability to graduate, friends, connections with mentors, health and wellbeing. In some of my experimental research, we find that being able to improve students’ belonging or to tamp down their worries about belonging can improve those outcomes. 

What do you mean by “belonging?”

In my research, we think about belonging as students’ own perception of their connection to their school or their campus. I’m a social psychologist, so we essentially ask, “To what extent do you feel like you belong?” 

Belonging is about building connections, finding ways in which you connect with this place. That takes time, and it’s going to change over time. There are things that institutions can do to build it, but often it looks less like pompoms than helping students know that a crappy day doesn’t mean you don’t belong here.

My prior work has found something that’s important and often overlooked is students’ worries about belonging. Instead of handing them a cup that says the university’s name on it, we can help them appreciate that a bad day doesn’t mean they don’t belong here. That message is something that can help them build resiliency across that first year on campus, or help them go to their professor’s office hours, even when it seems a little tough, to get the C on that first paper and redouble their efforts and figure out how to do college.

What does this latest study find about college belonging?

One of the things I was so excited about in this most recent study is we were actually able to connect students’ feelings about belonging in their first year at college with their ultimate receipt of a credential, their graduation, four or six years later. It’s actually something that can sustain students’ engagement on campus and help them earn that degree. 

We looked at students’ perceptions of belonging at their college their first year, and then we measured whether they graduated four or six years later. What we find is that a one-point increase in the belonging scale—going from like a one to a two or a two to a three—is associated with about a three-percentage-point increase in the likelihood that students will have earned a credential four years later. 

Essentially, students’ sense of belonging is predicting, years later, their likelihood of graduation. It’s really rare to be able to have both feelings of belonging and ultimate graduation outcomes in the same dataset.

How do you want colleges to use these findings?

Students’ feelings of belonging are not just this warm, fuzzy blanket. Belonging is actually predicting their likelihood to earn a credential years later. The findings are pretty consistent across different kinds of students. It seems that all students really are benefiting from a sense of belonging. 

Another takeaway is that in some cases we were able to measure that change in belonging from their first year to their third year. When students had positive trajectories across that time period, it was related to better graduation rates. We think there are things that instructors and campuses can do to improve students’ belonging.

A big thing that my work is trying to do is encourage universities to do a better job of collecting data about belonging, collecting it over time, and thinking about how to connect those data with other things we care about, like students accessing university resources, students’ likelihood to graduate, and what students end up doing and feeling after they graduate. If we had better data on this, especially better data across different kinds of schools, we could think more carefully, more intentionally, about how to improve students’ experiences in the short term and their outcomes in the long term.

For students and families in the midst of a college search right now, what do you want them to know about your research?

Reaching out and building relationships with peers and with professors and trying out different kinds of things, those are important as part of the college experience. I was in an international folk dance troupe when I was in college, and I didn’t dance before I went to college. But when I think back on my college experiences, that’s one really important, weird thing that I tried that ended up really mattering for how I felt connected to my campus. Hanging out with friends and trying weird stuff like the cheese club, those things can actually be a really important part of students’ experiences.

For most students, there is this sort of trajectory where at the beginning we feel really excited and hopeful, and then some stuff happens where maybe we get a terrible grade, maybe we don’t understand Plato, maybe people go out to dinner without us and we don’t know whether we were left out intentionally or they just didn’t think about us. When things are a little bit crappy, that is normal and it very well could mean that you’re doing college right. You’re putting yourself out there, you’re taking challenging courses, you’re seeing if this person is a good friend. That is part of the process of building your belonging on campus. Belonging isn’t something that’s given to us. We build it.