Just as it’s increasingly well appreciated that it is positive if employees have a sense of belonging with their employer, so the same is true of students and their universities. A recent paper from the University of Exeter highlights how forging deeper connections between students and their local communities could be a great way of achieving that.

The paper is based on interviews with students to understand how they foster a sense of belonging. The interviews revealed that this is best fostered via the context of the student’s sense of place in the wider world.

“While student belonging is increasingly prominent in policy, too often it is considered as an isolated phenomenon without any reference to students’ broader ideas about what it means to belong in the wider world,” the researchers explain. “This report suggests some ways in which belonging in higher education might be viewed in relation to belonging more generally. I hope it will encourage higher education policymakers to consider how pro-belonging policies can impact and promote students’ sense of belonging in the wider world.”

Sense of belonging

The sense of place students felt was notable in two specific areas. The first suggests that while diversity of both faculty and student body was welcomed, students were more cautious about any excessive emphasis on identity differences, and preferred instead to focus on what binds people together.

There was also a frustration from residential students about the lack of opportunities to really connect with the local community outside the campus.

“There are few things in life as important for personal well-being as feeling like you belong,” the researchers explain. “This is already much more widely recognized than it used to be, but we still need to do more work to understand how to inculcate a sense of belonging, including among students.”

Making things better

The authors provide a number of policy recommendations to improve matters and ensure students have a stronger sense of belonging:

1. Avoid reducing student belonging to a quirk of individual students and recognize instead that students emphasize the social, cultural, and environmental dimensions of belonging.
2. Work with students and staff to identify areas of common ground—Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion policies should be wary of highlighting divisions among students at the expense of student cohesion in academic and co-curricular activities.
3. Facilitate deeper connections between students and local communities to help students feel more “at home” where they live and to encourage them to contribute to a larger community beyond their institution.
4. Identify the cultural messages of the physical environment because students know that physical surroundings communicate ideas about who spaces are for and how much institutions value different people.
5. Co-create pro-belonging policies at a local rather than centralized level—for example, within departments or, if working with university-wide services (such as student mental health and well-being), in tandem with a departmental lead for student experience.