Measuring Student Belonging and Connecting It to Student Success Metrics
For years, student belonging was treated as something you could feel but couldn’t count. A warm campus culture. A welcoming advising office. A professor who remembered your name. Real, but unmeasurable.
That’s changing — and it needs to change faster.
As institutions face mounting pressure to improve graduation rates, close achievement gaps, and demonstrate ROI on student success initiatives, the conversation has shifted. Data offices, institutional research teams, and student affairs divisions are now asking the same question: how do we measure belonging, and how do we connect it to the outcomes that matter?
This post is for the people trying to answer that question. It covers the most validated instruments for measuring Sense of Belonging, the data practices that connect those measures to retention and academic success, and why the institutions making the most progress are treating belonging as infrastructure — not sentiment.
Why Belonging Needs to Be Measured
There’s a pragmatic case and a strategic case.
The pragmatic case: if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it, defend it in budget meetings, or scale it. Belonging programs that exist purely as good-faith initiatives tend to be the first to get cut when finances tighten. Programs tied to data survive.
The strategic case: student belonging is one of the strongest predictors of student success available to institutional researchers. The research literature is clear and consistent. A 2022 meta-analysis published in Review of Educational Research analyzed 66 studies on belonging interventions in higher education and found statistically significant positive effects on GPA, persistence, and wellbeing across diverse student populations — with the largest effects among students from historically underserved groups.
When belonging is measured, it can be tracked. When it’s tracked, it can be optimized. When it’s optimized, retention goes up.
The Most Validated Belonging Instruments in Higher Ed
There is no single universally adopted belonging scale in higher education, but several instruments have strong psychometric backing and broad adoption:
The Strayhorn Sense of Belonging Scale
Developed from the theoretical work of Dr. Terrell Strayhorn, this instrument captures belonging as a felt sense of mattering, acceptance, and social integration. It has been validated across diverse student populations and is widely used in both research and institutional assessment contexts.
Items typically include measures of whether students feel accepted, valued, and supported by peers, faculty, and the institution at large. Strayhorn’s own longitudinal studies using this instrument found significant correlations between belonging scores and academic motivation, grade performance, and intent to persist.
The Psychological Sense of School Membership (PSSM) Scale
Originally developed for K–12 by Goodenow (1993) and adapted for higher education contexts, the PSSM measures school-level belonging with a focus on acceptance, inclusion, and encouragement. Its higher-ed adaptations have been validated in community college and four-year residential contexts.
NSSE Belonging Items
The National Survey of Student Engagement includes items specifically tied to students’ sense of belonging at their institution. The advantage of NSSE-based belonging data is that it’s comparable across institutions — you can benchmark your campus against peer institutions and national norms. The limitation is that NSSE is administered annually and may not capture in-semester variation.
Campus Climate Surveys
Many institutions field custom campus climate surveys that include belonging measures alongside items on discrimination, mental health, and academic experience. The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA supports both the Faculty Survey and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey, which includes climate and belonging dimensions.
Connecting Belonging Data to Student Success Metrics
Measuring belonging is only valuable if the data flows to the right places. Here’s how institutions are connecting the dots:
Step 1: Disaggregate By Student Population
Belonging scores averaged across the entire student body will flatten the variation that matters most. Disaggregating by first-generation status, race/ethnicity, transfer status, enrollment intensity, and residential status reveals where belonging deficits are concentrated — and where targeted interventions are most needed.
Step 2: Map to Retention Triggers
The most powerful use of belonging data is predictive. Institutions that cross-reference mid-semester belonging assessments with early alert data (LMS logins, attendance, assignment completion) can identify students at risk of disengagement before it becomes dropout.
Georgia State University’s predictive analytics model — one of the most cited examples in higher education retention strategies — flags over 800 risk factors and triggers advisor outreach. Belonging and engagement indicators are among the most predictive variables in their model. Their strategy has helped them improve graduation rates by more than 20 percentage points over the past decade.
Step 3: Use Belonging Data to Evaluate Programs
If your institution runs a first-year experience program, a peer mentorship initiative, a living-learning community, or an empathy training program for faculty and staff, belonging measures should be part of how you evaluate those programs. Pre/post belonging scales give you a meaningful outcome variable that connects directly to the student experience you’re trying to improve.
Step 4: Integrate Into Institutional Dashboards
Belonging data shouldn’t live in a student affairs assessment binder. It belongs on the same dashboards where enrollment managers, provosts, and academic deans track student success metrics — persistence rates, GPA distributions, completion rates, time-to-degree.
When belonging is visible alongside these outcomes, it starts to be treated as a cause, not an afterthought.
Student Mental Health as a Belonging Indicator
One underutilized connection in institutional data is the relationship between belonging and student mental health. The American College Health Association (ACHA) National College Health Assessment consistently finds that students experiencing anxiety, depression, or loneliness are significantly more likely to report low belonging — and significantly more likely to consider withdrawing.
This creates a practical data integration opportunity: institutions that share de-identified counseling utilization trends with their retention and belonging teams can identify campus-level mental health patterns that predict disengagement.
Importantly, this isn’t about surveilling individual students. It’s about understanding campus-level patterns: which semester, which course types, which student populations are experiencing belonging deficits that manifest as mental health strain.
The Accountability Shift Happening in Higher Ed
Under increasing scrutiny from accreditors, state legislatures, and the federal government, institutions are being asked to demonstrate not just that students enrolled, but that they thrived. The Department of Education’s push for more rigorous outcome reporting is accelerating this shift.
Belonging measurement fits naturally into this accountability framework. Institutions that can demonstrate a causal link between their belonging programs and improved retention, graduation, and equity outcomes will be better positioned — for accreditation, for public reporting, and for securing the grant funding that increasingly requires documented equity and persistence outcomes.
Where to Go From Here
If your institution is just beginning to build out belonging measurement, a reasonable starting point is to:
- Select one validated instrument and administer it at mid-semester to first-year students
- Disaggregate results by key demographic groups and compare to retention data from prior cohorts
- Identify one program or initiative that can be evaluated using belonging as an outcome measure
- Begin a conversation between student affairs, institutional research, and academic affairs about what a shared belonging dashboard would look like
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s movement. Belonging that is measured is belonging that gets resourced.
Empathable works with higher education institutions to connect empathy-based professional development with measurable belonging and retention outcomes. If you’re building a student success measurement framework, we’d love to be part of the conversation.