US colleges and universities are struggling with declining enrollment, an exodus of their talent pool, and an unprecedented number of students and staff dealing with mental health issues.  While enrollment and staffing issues are unique to the US market, the global higher education community is struggling to manage the mental health crisis as well.  These are complex problems that will not be easy to solve.  However, we can draw on what we already know about human behavior and development to gain insights about what is happening and how we might approach addressing the issues.  In the early 1950s, Abraham Maslow proposed a hierarchical framework that sought to explain human needs and motivation.  His theory is still very relevant today and can be used as a lens for viewing the current state of student motivation and persistence in higher education.

How can Maslow’s hierarchy of needs provide a framework for student support and success?

If you work in education, you are familiar with Maslow’s work related to basic needs.  In a nutshell, Maslow provided a framework for human development that illustrates the importance of basic needs being met before an individual can progress through the other stages of development which culminates in the highest level of self actualization.  (see illustration).  In recent years, colleges and universities have begun to provide support for the foundational level of Maslow’s pyramid in the form of food pantries and housing support for homeless students to ensure that all of their students have their most basic needs met so that they have a better opportunity to be successful in school.  Something that many institutions don’t necessarily consider is that students who aren’t necessarily homeless, but who are working multiple jobs to help pay for school could also be considered to be stuck at that lowest level of the pyramid – making sure basic needs and security are met.  After working for over a decade with vulnerable student populations, I can tell you that many students who were more than able to perform academically still found themselves on probation or dismissed because they were so busy working multiple jobs to make ends meet that they could not focus on their studies despite their best efforts.  A brain focused in basic needs mode (fight or flight) will struggle to focus deeply on other things despite the individual’s best efforts to do so.  Conversely, students in similar situations who were able to focus on their studies and successfully completed the term academically often were forced to drop out due to outstanding balances.

How do community and belonging tie into higher needs and why is this relevant to student success?

Once a student’s basic needs are met, we can begin to look at the next levels of Maslow’s hierarchy.  Once physiological and safety needs are met, fostering a sense of belonging with students will help them progress to the higher levels of increased esteem and self-actualization.  We want our students to be spending most of their time in these higher levels where they can develop and flourish as humans and citizens.  However, this is something that has largely been viewed as “beyond” what was necessary and so focus has largely remained on things like: how many events and activities should we host?, what types of events and activities should we host?, and how can we get more students to attend the events and activities that we host?, instead of will the events and activities we are planning foster community and a sense of belonging with our students?  How?  In fact, belonging is becoming more than just a buzz word.  According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, more schools are even adding administrative positions focused solely on student belonging.  Terrell Strayhorn, George Kuh, and Jillian Kinzie have all been writing about student engagement and belonging for years.  We know that students who feel like they belong earn higher grades and persist at greater rates than those who don’t.  One of the biggest challenges we face “post-Covid” is figuring out how to engage students to foster that sense of belonging we know is critical to student success.

How to successfully foster community in a digital age

Colleges and universities still depend on traditional forms of communication to engage their students:  email, mail by post, text messaging, and social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.  However, these forms of communication may be sufficient for informing, but they do nothing for fostering community or belonging.  The first three listed are one directional forms of communication and are very narrow in scope when it comes to message delivery and engagement.  Social media platforms better represent the way this generation of students communicate, but institutions have no control over the space – anyone can join and post (even individuals outside of the institution), the social media platforms control ads, data, and other algorithms on their platforms.  So, these platforms are ok for pushing content, but not necessarily for building community.

One of the best ways that schools can foster community on their campuses with their students who are primarily digital natives is to meet them where they live – on their smartphones.  Recent research by the Pew Research Center indicated that nearly all teens now have access to a smartphone, and that this trend holds true across demographic groups.  Schools are beginning to recognize this and have adopted mobile apps for their campuses.  Apps can help to centralize resources for students and can provide easy access to the disparate systems that they are forced to navigate to be successful on campus.  Beyond this, the one thing that mobile apps can and should do is foster a sense of community and belonging.  

In recent months I’ve been able to connect with colleagues across the country to find out how they are connecting with their students and helping them to develop meaningful connections and networks of support.  Here is a summary of what they shared:

• Several schools are leaning into the community space in their campus apps to foster student connections and sense of belonging.  This seems to work particularly well when the admissions, advising, and orientation teams impress upon students the importance of downloading the app and becoming a part of the community as early as possible in their college career.  My own experiences as an administrator align with this.  When our admissions, advising, and orientation teams spoke with students about the app as if it were part of their college experience we saw over 90% adoption rates, decreased summer melt and improved first semester retention with vulnerable student populations.  Anecdotally, I believe this was due in part to the fact that many students who engaged in the community space the summer before attending classes actually had friend groups and networks of support in place before classes began.
• I attended a conference in November where one school made a switch in their communication strategy from sending all targeted communications via email, text, and app notification to asking students how they preferred to be communicated with at the time of enrollment.  The speaker’s initial impressions were that they were sending fewer communications and had a higher response rate.  I thought this was a great idea.  I wonder what would happen if they took things one step further and asked students to identify the types of communications they would like to receive:  events, support services, wellbeing, clubs and organizations, etc.  Are students more likely to engage with content they have opted into receiving?
• Several schools with vibrant digital communities are exploring whether or not they can support students in a more non-threatening way by pushing curated content on a particular topic to the community space at various times during the term that coincide with student lifecycle pain points (i.e. pushing information about financial aid and bill payment plans the first week of classes).  Students are accustomed to interacting with information in this way and it is less threatening to come across information about how to pay your bill or get help with financial aid in a community feed than it is to receive a formal targeted “you owe us money” email.

If you aren’t yet focused on fostering connections and sense of belonging on your campus, I encourage you to do so.  There are no easy solutions to the complex problem of connecting students in meaningful ways to foster belonging, but you can start to make progress with baby steps.  If you focus on incremental baby steps you can begin to enact real change on your campus.  

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” -Lao Tzu