Faculty Student Relationships
Every retention conversation eventually turns to advising, RAs, or first-year programming. Faculty rarely come up, which is strange, because the research on faculty student relationships is some of the most consistent in all of higher education, and most of it goes untapped. Students who have even brief, informal contact with a professor outside of class show better academic performance, higher satisfaction, and stronger persistence than students who don’t. The lever is sitting there. Almost nobody is pulling it.
The research is old and the finding hasn’t changed
Pascarella and Terenzini’s long-running review of college outcomes research, spanning decades of studies, found statistically significant links between informal student-faculty contact and five separate outcomes: educational aspirations, satisfaction with college, intellectual and personal development, academic achievement, and persistence. That’s not a niche finding from one study. It’s one of the more replicated results in the field, and it holds up even after controlling for the traits students arrive with.
The catch, and it’s a big one: most students don’t take advantage of it. Research on office hour usage consistently finds that the majority of students never go, or go only when required to for a specific assignment. The interaction with the highest documented payoff in the research is also the one students are least likely to initiate on their own.
Why “be more approachable” doesn’t fix it
Ask a provost’s office why faculty-student interaction is low, and the answer tends to land on personality: some professors are warm and accessible, others aren’t, and that’s just how it is. That framing is a dead end, for the same reason it’s a dead end everywhere else in higher education. It treats a specific, trainable interaction as a fixed trait.
What the research actually points to is narrower and more fixable. Studies on the “ethic of care” in faculty-student interaction found that students are far more likely to seek out a professor when they’ve picked up on a specific signal, an invitation that goes beyond “come to office hours if you have questions,” or a comment that shows the professor noticed something about them individually. Students, especially first-generation students and those less familiar with how to navigate faculty relationships, are also more hesitant to initiate contact even when a professor is genuinely open to it. The gap isn’t always a caring gap. It’s often an invitation gap and a confidence gap, on both sides.
The behaviors that actually move this number
Applied to a classroom or office hours setting, the same three behaviors that drive belonging elsewhere on campus work here too:
Acknowledgment. Naming something specific about a student’s work or situation, rather than a generic “let me know if you need help,” is what makes an invitation register as real. “I noticed your last paper took a different angle than most, come talk to me about it” gets a different response than a blanket office-hours reminder.
Curiosity. When a student is struggling, asking one question about what’s actually going on, workload, a concept that didn’t land, something outside class, before jumping to a grade conversation, surfaces the real issue instead of the presenting one.
Demonstration. A specific, low-friction next step. “Come by Tuesday at 2, I want to walk through question three with you” gets far more follow-through than “my office hours are posted on the syllabus.”
Where this gets hardest: the difficult academic conversation
The highest-stakes version of faculty-student interaction is the conversation about a failing grade, a missed deadline pattern, or a student who’s clearly checked out. Faculty often handle this one of two ways: purely administrative, citing the syllabus and moving on, or avoided altogether until it’s too late to matter. Neither serves the student.
The more effective version treats it as productive confrontation: naming the academic reality directly and without softening it, paired immediately with a specific path forward. A student needs to hear both that the situation is serious and that the faculty member is invested enough to have the conversation at all. That combination, honest and clearly on the student’s side, is what research on faculty-student interaction and STEM mentoring in particular has linked to students staying in a major rather than quietly switching out or withdrawing after a rough grade.
Not all faculty contact is positive, and that matters too
It’s worth being direct about the other side of this research: studies on student-faculty interaction have also found that negative interactions, students feeling dismissed, judged, or made to feel like they don’t belong in a discipline, are linked to lower retention, and that traditional, well-intentioned forms of interaction don’t automatically offset that harm. This isn’t an argument for more faculty contact at any cost. It’s an argument for training the specific behaviors that make contact land as support rather than judgment.
Why this belongs in a training budget, not a culture conversation
Faculty development budgets tend to go toward pedagogy and course design, both worth funding, but rarely toward the specific interpersonal behaviors that determine whether a student walks into office hours at all. Given how consistently the research ties faculty-student interaction to persistence, that’s a gap worth closing. Empathable works with Academic Affairs and Student Affairs teams together to build faculty-facing training around these exact behaviors, so a professor’s door being open on paper actually translates into students walking through it.