Every fall, I watch new cohorts arrive at colleges and universities across the country, and every fall, I watch institutions greet them with the same instinct: build a new program. A belonging initiative. A first-year seminar. A peer mentor network. These are not bad ideas. But they are downstream of the real decision that determines whether they work — and that is who is leading them.
A new Gallup and Walton Family Foundation study of Gen Z students should be required reading for every cabinet member this year. The finding that stopped me: about a third of middle and high school students say they don’t feel like they belong at school, and a similar share say there isn’t a single adult there who checks in on them regularly. These are the students who are filling out your applications right now.
Belonging isn’t a soft metric that colleges can nod at in a strategic plan and move past. The Gallup data shows it’s one of the three strongest predictors of whether a student is engaged at all, alongside coursework relevance and supportive relationships with adults. And the students who lack that sense of belonging aren’t a fringe group. They are disproportionately the same students who are least confident they’re prepared for college itself and what comes next: lower-income students, students not planning to pursue a four-year degree, and the students that our access and equity missions exist to serve. In other words, the “belonging” gap is largest for the very students who could benefit the most.
That’s the part I want higher ed leaders to sit with. This generation is arriving on our campuses having already lived through years of feeling unseen in an institutional setting. If we assume that a single orientation week or a slick digital dashboard will undo that, we are underestimating both the depth of the problem and the level of the response it requires.
The belonging gap is one that can be challenging to bridge – and it’s often not addressed early enough. I’ve spent enough of my career inside cabinet-level hiring decisions to know the pattern. When enrollment dips, we hire aggressively for the VP of Enrollment Management. When a financial exposure surfaces, we go all in on the CFO search. But when the problem is belonging — arguably the most predictive lever we have for retention, persistence, and student thriving — we too often default to hiring a mid-level director and hoping the org chart catches up later.
That has to change. The leader responsible for belonging on a campus — whether that’s a Vice President for Student Success, a Dean of Students with real budget authority, or a newly elevated Chief Student Experience Officer — needs to be recruited with the same rigor and the same seat at the table as any other cabinet-level hire. That’s not because the title matters for its own sake, but because the work does. The corporate sector has started to get this right by hiring Chief Experience Officers with all the appropriate CX certifications. This is yet another business decision where higher education lags.
Building belonging at institutional scale means redesigning advising models, training and educating existing faculty to see relationship-building as part of the job rather than an add-on (and hiring new faculty who agree with that from the onset as part of the interview process), and creating systems that make sure no student falls through without a single adult noticing. That is high-level architectural work. It’s the kind of work that requires someone who has done it before, who understands data as well as they understand a residence hall, and who can hold faculty and staff accountable to a culture shift that a director-level hire just doesn’t have the authority to drive.
The Gallup findings also offer a note of real optimism: these outcomes are not fixed. When students have the right experiences—coursework that feels relevant, an adult who checks in, a genuine sense of fit—their engagement, confidence in their future, and overall wellbeing improve substantially, regardless of their background or academic performance. That is the case for investing in the right leader now, before another cohort arrives already convinced that no one at the institution is looking out for them.
The question every board and president should be asking this year isn’t whether to launch a belonging initiative. It’s whether the person tasked with owning it has the mandate, the seat, and the track record to produce outcomes that move the dial in terms of persistence through belonging.