Editor’s note: The following article draws on a discussion from the webinar titled “Beyond Belonging: The Next Era of Student Retention.” Rather than serving as a transcript of the session, this article synthesizes the key themes, perspectives and ideas the conversation explored. To watch the full webinar, click here.
Higher education has spent years investing in student engagement and belonging. Institutions have built communities, expanded support services and created countless opportunities for students to connect with one another and their campuses. Those efforts matter, but there is an uncomfortable question worth asking: Are they enough?
Retention remains a major challenge, even as institutions become better at creating opportunities for students to feel connected. That suggests it may be time to broaden the conversation. Belonging is important, but student success cannot be reduced to whether a learner attends an event, persists to the next semester or ultimately earns a credential. The real question is whether the experience is producing the outcomes an institution and its students intended.
Stop Confusing Activity with Impact
Higher education has no shortage of metrics. Institutions track retention, persistence, completion, job placement, participation and satisfaction. These numbers are useful, but none of them tells the whole story. As Joe Levy put it during the webinar, simply doing something does not mean students learned from it or benefited from it.
The same is true of retention. A student can persist without achieving the learning, development or career outcomes they hoped for. A graduate can earn a degree without developing the competencies that degree was intended to provide. That does not make these traditional measures irrelevant. It means institutions should be careful about treating them as proxies for student success. Instead, institutions need to define success for themselves, then build assessment around that definition.
Start with Better Questions
Good assessment does not begin with a survey. It begins with a question: What are we actually trying to understand? Before collecting another data point, institutions should define the outcome they care about, identify the questions they need answered and determine what they will do with the information once they have it.
That sounds straightforward, but it is easy to skip. Institutions already have enormous amounts of data. The challenge is rarely collecting more. It is deciding which information is meaningful enough to act on. That also means resisting the temptation to measure everything. Assessment should be meaningful, impactful, manageable, informative and robust. If a piece of data will not inform a decision, change a practice or help an institution understand its learners better, there is a reasonable question about whether it needs to be collected at all.
Make Assessment Part of the Work, Not a Compliance Exercise
Assessment is often associated with accreditation. That can make it feel like something institutions do periodically, when a review is approaching or a report is due. That is the wrong frame. The goal should be to make continuous improvement part of normal institutional practice. Accreditation requirements can provide a floor, but institutions should be aiming higher than simply meeting the minimum.
That requires a willingness to look honestly at what is working and what is not. Sometimes the data will confirm an institution’s assumptions. Sometimes it will expose a gap between what staff intended to accomplish and what students actually experienced. Both outcomes are useful. The important part is what happens next.
Put Students Back in the Conversation
One of the simplest ways to improve how institutions define student success is also one of the most frequently overlooked: ask students. Institutions collect enormous amounts of information about students, yet do not always include students in conversations about what success means or how well an experience is working. That needs to change.
Students can help institutions understand where friction exists, what support is useful and where an experience falls short of its intended purpose. Those perspectives can be gathered through surveys, focus groups, conversations with advisors and faculty, or other forms of direct feedback. The goal is not to build a perfect measurement system. It is to build a system that helps an institution pay attention.
Progress Over Perfection
The most useful mindset for institutional effectiveness may be a simple one: progress over perfection. Student needs change. Programs change. Workforce expectations change. Institutional priorities change. An assessment process that worked two years ago may no longer answer the questions an institution needs to ask today. That means student success cannot be a static definition or a once-a-year report.
Belonging will continue to matter, but the next step is to connect belonging, engagement and persistence to something deeper: evidence that students are learning, developing and moving toward the goals that brought them to higher education in the first place. The institutions in the best position to navigate a changing higher education landscape will not necessarily be the ones collecting the most data. They will be the ones willing to ask better questions, then do something with the answers.