College Belonging

How First-year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life

Lisa M. Nunn

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781978807679
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

College Belonging reveals how colleges' and universities' efforts to foster a sense of belonging in their students are misguided. Colleges bombard new students with the message to "get out there!" and "find your place" by joining student organizations, sports teams, clubs and the like. Nunn shows that this reflects a flawed understanding of what belonging is and how it works. Drawing on the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim, College Belonging shows that belonging is something that members of a community offer to each other. It is something that must be given, like a gift. Individuals cannot simply walk up to a group or community and demand belonging. That's not how it works. The group must extend a sense of belonging to each and every member. It happens by making a person feel welcome, to feel that their presence matters to the group, that they would be missed if they were gone. This critical insight helps us understand why colleges' push for students simply to "get out there!" does not always work.

1

Social Belonging versus Campus-Community Belonging

Of the three realms of belonging, social belonging is perhaps the most straightforward to understand, particularly in terms of the Durkheimian insight that belonging is a gift that is offered by a community to individual members. If you feel like you belong in a social group such as a friendship circle or a soccer team or a hiking club, it is because the members of that group make you feel like you are a part of it. Belonging is a feeling that you matter to the group, that you are valued for who you are and what you bring. Katie sums it up well in her first semester when she describes her new college friends: “I love hanging out with them. I feel like they want me to hang out with them. Like I’m not just there. And it just makes me happier to know that I have friends that want me there, that make me feel like I belong.” Katie is a continuing-generation student at Private who describes her ethnoracial identity as “I am Vietnamese, but if I were to describe myself, I would say Asian American.” For the most part, Katie is poised and a bit formal in our interview, but when she starts talking about her college friends, she softens, and her eyes light up. She unmistakably experiences social belonging: she feels wanted.

Like Katie, students at both universities generally describe social belonging as finding friends whom they enjoy. Social belonging often includes participating in student organizations, sports teams, clubs, performance troupes, religious groups, and the like where students meet new people and strengthen friendships through shared experiences and shared interests. Dormitory life is also a common source of friendships for first-year students. Even students who do not get along well with their assigned roommates often find friends among their fellow floor-mates.

Immediate Social Belonging

Some students experience a sense of social belonging right away. Madison at Private is an example. She is a continuing-generation student who ethnoracially identifies as “White.” In her first interview with me she is exuberant, her long blond hair tied stylishly over one shoulder, accenting the wide scoop neck of her t-shirt: “It’s weird only being here for five weeks, but I do feel like I belong here and I know that I’ll be here for the next four years. I can’t see myself being anywhere else. I feel like part of the community.” Madison was full of smiles as she elaborated:

I just feel like going to class, you automatically are part of the community. Just meeting people in class and your professor and just walking around. Just friends and going to class … After classes we always go to Campus Café and get eggs afterward, and then do our homework there sometimes. We do that two or three times a week. We have been getting our nails done, shopping, going to the beach, going to the pool, studying, eating, like us all eat together, going to parties together.

Madison seems to have found friends quite effortlessly, including “just meeting people in class,” which other students did not find easy to do. In her response in her first interview, she also includes all three realms of belonging as parts of a whole: friends, classes, and community. After “only being here for five weeks,” she already experiences belonging in all three realms.

Joining student organizations or simply being open to building friendships in the dorm created strong social belonging for many students. Spencer offers a description of both. He is a continuing-generation student at Private who describes his ethnoracial identity as “I can’t really identify as anything other than White.” In our first interview, Spencer tells me, “I think for me the best thing about Private would be probably just the solidarity in the community. I think I’ve said it a lot, but just so far the fact that I honestly felt like these places are like home. Not just a temporary living space for students. I guess it’s more in the organizations I’ve been a part of.” Spencer is soft-spoken but not shy. His quiet voice and strong eye contact hold my attention as he thoughtfully tells me about his experiences. We are sitting in the breezy outdoors at a table near a campus coffee shop. He talks about the differences he sees between high school and college:

I’ve found much more community here. I found that everything’s so united. You live with the same people you consider your friends, so you don’t have to worry so much about the social anxiety of who you go out with and all that kind of thing. It’s just a very much more supportive community, I believe. There’s thousands of student organizations where you can easily make friends. You don’t have to be invited to go out as it was in high school. I think that most of the social barriers that create social classes just disappear in college.

In general, students at both schools sound a lot alike when they describe social belonging. Easton is a continuing-generation student at Public who identifies as “I would say White. My dad is fully Swedish. I call myself Western European.” Social belonging was immediate for Easton, as it was for Madison over at Private. “I found my initial group of friends on Visiting Day,” which is a day for accepted students to come to campus while they are still in high school. “The people that I met there were unbelievably friendly,” he shares with me. Easton’s voice and demeanor exude confidence, and so I was not surprised to hear that friendships come easily to him. Apparently he became fast friends that Visiting Day afternoon with a fellow prospective student who had also just been accepted. Easton laughs heartily as he describes the scene: “He brought a microphone with him, and there was a giant Jenga table with the bricks; he was just screaming, ‘Friendship and Jenga!’ I thought he was someone that was [already enrolled] here. But nope, it was one just like us.”

The two of them were still close friends, along with other “Visiting Day buddies,” as Easton calls them, when we had our third interview at the end of his second year. Easton is one of the 28.0 percent of Public students who had steady social belonging at all three interviews. He had also joined a fraternity, and he said he maintains his “two sets of friends” quite easily. He explains, “Everyone coexists well together. I don’t think there’s much division between people at Public.” In this regard, Easton sounds similar to Spencer at Private, who commented, “I think that most of the social barriers that create social classes just disappear in college.”

At the same time, important differences exist between Public and Private, and differences also exist between continuing-generation and first-generation students at both schools. Students in my study, like Easton at Public, experience social belonging at a higher rate in their first semester than do first-generation students (see table 2). In contrast, at Private first-generation students claim it at a higher rate than do continuing-generation students. Despite that finding, I highlight three continuing-generation Private students here—Katie, Madison, and Spencer—because in their first interviews, continuing-generation students more commonly described their social belonging as occurring immediately and being complete, whereas first-generation students rarely experienced it that way.

Social Belonging Shifts over Time: At Private

Certainly not everyone has “automatic” access to social belonging, as Madison calls it. At Private 58.3 percent (21 of 36) of my sample describe experiencing social belonging in their first interview, near the start of their first semester.¹ Yet that means more than 40 percent experienced only partial social belonging or no social belonging early in their first semester.² Of course, belonging is not static. It is dynamic, just as communities themselves are dynamic. Belonging shifts over time for many students, waxing for some, waning for others, and for a few in my study it is a roller coaster of ups and downs.

Karla is a typical example of how social belonging can build slowly over time. She is a first-generation student who identifies ethnoracially as “I don’t limit myself to one of my ethnicities. I’m Puerto Rican, African American and Ecuadorian. I’m very proud of all those.” In her second interview with me at the end of her first year, she is sitting across from me, leaning comfortably back in her chair. Her long, dark curly hair is pulled back, and she is dressed simply but neatly in a t-shirt and flannel. She excitedly shares, “I just rushed to join a sorority. So now I’m a part of a sorority, so I feel like now I’m a part of the Private community for real now.” Karla is not unusual in this way. I heard from multiple students at both Private and Public that joining Greek life offered a profound sense of social belonging by providing a large number of welcoming new friends and a never-ending stream of events to be a part of.

On many campuses, sororities and fraternities play a central role in the social scene, particularly at universities with a “party school” reputation (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013). Although the Greek system is often critiqued as solidifying socioeconomic class inequalities among students, scholarship also emphasizes the benefits of the social networks that students access through fraternities and sororities (Delgado-Guerrero, Cherniak, and Gloria 2014; Stuber 2015; Walker, Martin, and Hussey 2015; Thiele and Robinson 2019). It seems that, even at schools like the two in my study, which do not have “party school” reputations, Greek letter organizations are perceived as central to campus life.

Like others, Karla expressed a sense of relief that Greek life met her social belonging needs so easily. She said that, at Private, her sense of belonging, which she defined strictly as social belonging, was “iffy at first.” Her voice seemed sincere; she did not cover her vulnerability with laughter or distracted fidgeting. When I asked what she had struggled with the most as she was adjusting to college during her first semester, she answered, “Finding where I belong.” She continued, “Just figuring out that one group of people or those multiple groups of people that I really can be myself around and go to for things. Because for a long time it was just me and my best friend, the RA. It was just us and we’d go from group to group and be like, ‘Okay, we’ve found our place.’ And then we’d be like, ‘Oh wait, we don’t really like these people. You don’t want to hang around these people!’ ”

At Private, 61.3 percent (19 of 31) of students experienced social belonging at their third interview at the end of their second year, which is a slight increase from the 58.3 percent (20 of 34) at the first interview (see table 2). Karla was part of that uptick. However, only 45.2 percent (14 of 31) experienced social belonging consistently over their first two years; 12.9 percent (4 of 31) declined in social belonging, whereas 16.1 percent (5 of 31) increased over time, including Karla (see table 3).

Importantly, first-generation students and continuing-generation students do not have parallel access to social belonging at Private. As table 2 shows, a larger share of first-generation students experienced social belonging at the first interview (66.7%, or 10 of 15) compared to 52.4 percent (11 of 21) of continuing-generation students. The pattern flip-flops at the end of the students’ first year, with 10 percent more continuing-generation than first-generation students experiencing social belonging. By the end of the third year, they are at parity, at approximately 61 percent in each group. However, as table 3 shows, the 45.2 percent who experienced steady social belonging represent 50.0 percent (9 of 18) of continuing-generation students and only 38.5 percent (5 of 13) of first-generation students. These numbers illustrate that first-generation students are somewhat more likely to have ups and downs with social belonging at Private.

However, being a continuing-generation student does not ensure strong belonging by any stretch. Whereas Spencer was one of the 45.2 percent with steady belonging, Madison was not. In fact, she transferred to a new university in the middle of her second year, despite telling me five weeks into her first semester that “I do feel like I belong here and I know that I’ll be here for the next four years. I can’t see myself being anywhere else.”

In a phone interview from her new campus on the East Coast, Madison explains how she made the decision to leave:

I was evaluating who I was acting like at Private and it was so different from who I am when I am around my friends at home. Was I trying to be someone I’m not? … Things like always wearing makeup to class, I found myself doing that at Private even though I had never been like that, caring about how I look for class. I was evaluating: Do I want to be friends with these people? I just wasn’t loving it anymore.

Social belonging was clearly a critical part of Madison’s decision to leave. Her experience helps us see an important distinction between belonging and “fitting in.” As social psychologist and popular author Brené Brown (2010) articulates it, fitting in is about knowing what you have to do to make yourself acceptable to a particular crowd, but belonging is being accepted and valued for who you are, for your authentic self. Madison seems to have realized that what had felt like belonging at first turned out to be merely fitting in, and it drove her to find a new university to call home.

Blake Silver (2020) demonstrates how ubiquitous it is for college students to reshape their identities to fit in. In his research at a large public university, he shows that students follow patterned ways of presenting themselves in interest-based student organizations such as the “Cardio Club” running group and “Volunteer Community” service organization. Students often get trapped into “cookie-cutter selves,” which he describes as two-dimensional identities that constrain how individual students are able to behave and express themselves. The group dynamics seem to cement very quickly around initial presentations of self, and then students’ “cookie-cutter selves” are policed and reinforced in microlevel interactions with surprising consistency. In interviews with Silver, many students expressed dissatisfaction because the group they joined did not make room for them to be more dynamic, complex, authentic versions of themselves. Silver rightly critiques the university for not better equipping first-year students with the tools to engage in campus social spaces as equals. Many students were “liminal figures” and struggled to feel a sense of belonging because they did not feel valued or recognized by the group. Silver’s study underscores the important role that peer relationships through student organizations can play in social belonging. His findings also reinforce the understanding held by the students in my study that being able to be their “true self” is at the heart of what it means to experience social belonging. For students like Madison, not having it is enough to make transferring schools a viable solution.

Social Belonging Shifts over Time: At Public

Although students define social belonging in the same ways at both schools, at Public, it is experienced at lower rates: in their first interview near the start of their first year in college, 41.9 percent (13 of 31) of my sample experienced social belonging at Public compared to 58.3 percent at Private. In the next chapter I suggest that an explanation for Private’s higher rate of belonging is that their organizational structures and campus culture prioritize relationships. By the third interview 64.0 percent (16 of 25) of the sample at Public experienced social belonging, which is just above the level at Private of 61.3 percent. Thus, accessing increased social belonging over time is fairly common at Public: 32 percent (8 out of 25) experienced this. However, another 20.0% (5 of 25) saw decreased social belonging, so experiences ranged widely.

Additionally, differences exist at Public in how social belonging is offered to continuing-generation versus first-generation students. As table 2 shows, at Public, there is a steady pattern of continuing-generation students consistently having their social belonging needs met at higher rates than do first-generation students. It is a difference of approximately 20 percent at each of the three interviews. Adding another layer of complexity to these dynamics, 44.4 percent of continuing-generation students at Public experience steady social belonging across their first two years, compared to 18.8 percent (3 of 16) of first-generation students (see table 3). Higher numbers of first-generation students see their social belonging improve over time (37.5% compared to 22.2% of continuing-generation students), but higher numbers also see their social belonging decline over time (25.0% compared to 11.1% of continuing-generation students). Clearly, social belonging is neither steadfast nor easy to come by at Public.

Skylar is a good example of a student who has experienced increased social belonging over time, which happens for 32.0 percent of my sample at Public. She is a continuing-generation student who ethnoracially identifies as “just White.” By the time of our first interview, Skylar was already an ...