Faculty as Barriers or Facilitators of Student Belonging: Comparisons Across Different Racial Groups

Sense of belonging in college is a precursor to multiple positive outcomes, but institutions consistently produce less sense of belonging for Students of Color than for White students. Using structural equation modeling with a national dataset, this study tested the ways faculty behaviors predict sense of belonging among students from four different racial/ethnic groups. We first examined the ways faculty support, faculty stereotypes, and satisfaction with the amount of faculty contact predict students’ sense of belonging directly and indirectly through their perceptions of campus diversity climate. Then, we disaggregated our data by student race/ethnicity to test how the pathways to sense of belonging vary by student racial background. Our findings demonstrate that Students of Color end up with a lower sense of belonging than their White peers by receiving less faculty support, encountering more faculty stereotypes, and through a less powerful effect of satisfaction with the amount of faculty contact. Findings also suggest that receiving frequent faculty support did not mitigate the perceptions of faculty stereotyping among Students of Color while it did so for White students.