Theoretical Framework: From Integration to Belonging

Sense of belonging is most precisely defined, within the higher education literature, as a students’ perceived social support on campus, a feeling of connectedness, and the experience of mattering and feeling valued by the campus community (Strayhorn 2008). Strayhorn’s empirical work, building on Maslow’s account of belonging as a basic human need, positions belonging as a psychological state that is necessary, though not sufficient, for students to engage academically and socially once enrolled. This construct narrows and operationalises a piece of what Tinto’s broader integration framework described only in general terms, namely the subjective experience of feeling that one fits within, and is valued by, an institution, as opposed to the more behavioural measures of integration such as participation in clubs or interactions with faculty that earlier persistence research tended to emphasize.

Hurtado and Carter (1997), writing in Sociology of Education, extended this line of thinking by arguing explicitly that Tinto’s model of integration, with its emphasis on assimilation into the dominant campus culture, didn’t adequately capture the experience of Latin(o)(x) students navigating a racially hostile or unfamiliar campus climate. Their study found that students’ sense of belonging in the third year of college was shaped less by formal integration into existing campus structures and more by informal experiences, discussions of course content with peers outside class, and membership in community and religious organizations that allowed students to maintain rather than abandon their own cultural frameworks. This finding reframed belonging not as a single universal experience but as one that is constructed differently depending on a student’s social position and campus climate, a theme that recurs throughout the subsequent literature.

The Empirical Case for Belonging as a Persistence Lever

A substantial empirical literature now links sense of belonging directly to persistence outcomes, including through randomized intervention research that establishes the relationship as causal rather than merely correlational. Hausmann, Schofield, and Woods (2007), writing in Research in Higher Education, used individual growth curve modelling to track African American and White first-year students across an academic year and found that sense of belonging predicted intentions to persist even after controlling for background variables and other known predictors of persistence. The same study tested a brief intervention designed to bolster belonging and found that it increased belonging for White students, though not for African American students, illustrating that belonging interventions are not uniformly effective across all student populations and must be designed with attention to who is least likely to feel they belong by default.

Walton and Cohen (2011), in a widely cited study published in Science, offered the most rigorous causal evidence available. In a randomized controlled trial, first-year students received a brief intervention that reframed social adversity on campus as common and temporary rather than as evidence of not belonging. The intervention raised the grade point average of Black students relative to control groups over a three-year follow-up period and halved the achievement gap between Black and White students in the study, while also improving self-reported health outcomes. Because the intervention took less than an hour to administer yet produced effects that persisted for years, Walton and Cohen’s findings established belonging as an unusually high-leverage psychological target for institutional intervention, a level of evidence that few other retention-oriented constructs can claim.

Hoffman, Richmond, Morrow, and Salomone (2002), writing in the Journal of College Student Retention, examined sense of belonging among a broader first-year population and identified five components, peer support, classroom comfort, perceived faculty support, campus support for diverse populations, and a general sense of belonging, that together predicted persistence intentions. Their work is notable for demonstrating that belonging is not a single undifferentiated feeling but is built from several distinguishable institutional experiences, several of which, such as classroom comfort and faculty support, are squarely within the control of academic departments and individual instructors rather than student affairs alone.

Belonging Across Student Populations and Its Core Dimensions

Strayhorn (2008) examined how diverse peer interactions affected sense of belonging specifically for Black men at predominantly White institutions, finding that informal cross-racial interactions with peers were positively associated with belonging, but that the relationship was more complex than a simple contact hypothesis would predict, since the quality and context of those interactions mattered more than their frequency alone. Taken together with Hurtado and Carter’s (1997) findings on Latino students, this body of work establishes that belonging operates differently depending on a student’s social identity and the campus climate they encounter, reinforcing the broader point that SEM strategies built around a single generic notion of belonging risk underserving the very students for whom belonging is least automatic.

More recently, researchers have attempted to consolidate this fragmented literature into a coherent set of core dimensions. Ahn and Davis (2020), writing in Studies in Higher Education, proposed four domains of students’ sense of belonging: academic, social, the relationship with the institution itself, and the surrounding community context beyond campus. Gilani and Thomas (2025), in a critical literature review published in the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, arrived at a similar four-theme structure through systematic review, identifying connectedness to peers, staff, and the institution; feeling safe and part of a community; being valued and accepted; and the embrace of diversity and inclusion as the recurring elements across the belonging literature. Gilani and Thomas (2025) further emphasize that belonging is shaped at the institutional, programmatic, and individual educator levels simultaneously, meaning that no single SEM intervention, whether an orientation program or a faculty training session, is likely to be sufficient on its own.

Implications for SEM Practice

Mapped onto the four-phase enrolment planning cycle described by Connell and Smith (2023), the belonging literature suggests concrete points of intervention. In the analysis phase, institutions should move beyond satisfaction surveys to measure belonging directly, using validated instruments consistent with the dimensions identified by Ahn and Davis (2020) and Gilani and Thomas (2025), and should disaggregate that data by student population given the divergent findings of Hurtado and Carter (1997) and Strayhorn (2008). In the strategic phase, recruitment and orientation messaging can draw on the Walton and Cohen (2011) model of normalizing social adversity as common and temporary rather than allowing prospective and incoming students to interpret early difficulty as evidence that they do not belong. In the interaction phase, the Hoffman and colleagues (2002) finding that classroom comfort and perceived faculty support are distinct, controllable components of belonging argues for embedding belonging-building practices directly into academic departments and individual course design, not only into student affairs programming, a point with direct relevance to faculty development. In the continuation phase, institutions should track whether belonging interventions are closing or widening gaps between student populations over time, consistent with the caution in Hausmann, Schofield, and Woods (2007) that a single intervention design will not necessarily benefit all students equally.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

The belonging literature reviewed here is concentrated in the United States, and the foundational intervention studies, in particular Walton and Cohen (2011) and Hausmann, Schofield, and Woods (2007), were conducted at individual research-intensive institutions rather than across the more varied institutional types, including community colleges and smaller teaching-focused colleges, that make up much of the Canadian postsecondary sector. Future research would benefit from belonging intervention studies conducted in Canadian institutional contexts, and from research that extends the Walton and Cohen (2011) intervention model to international students, whose experience of campus climate and belonging may differ in ways not captured by the largely domestic-student samples in the existing literature. Gilani and Thomas (2025) themselves note that despite the volume of belonging scholarship, relatively little of it translates findings into operational guidance for enrolment management practitioners specifically, a gap this review attempts to begin closing.

Conclusion

The persistence theory underlying Connell and Smith’s (2023) account of SEM practice treated social and academic integration as a broad, somewhat diffuse construct. The belonging literature reviewed here sharpens that construct into something more precise, measurable, and, on the evidence of Walton and Cohen (2011), directly intervenable. Belonging is not evenly distributed by default: it is shaped by campus climate, by the quality of peer and faculty interaction, and by whether students from historically underserved populations are made to feel they must assimilate into an existing culture or are instead welcomed on their own terms. For SEM leaders, the practical implication is that belonging deserves to be tracked, designed for, and resourced as deliberately as enrolment funnels and yield rates, since the evidence increasingly suggests that it is one of the more direct levers available for improving persistence.