Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

There are significant disparities in the rates of persistence and achievement of ethnic-minority and first-generation college students in the US. Nationally, 31 percent of the first-time postsecondary Black students who matriculated at a 4-year college in AY 2011-12 dropped out within the first three years as compared to 18 percent of white students. Similarly, 32 percent of first-generation college students dropped out within the first three years compared to 12 percent of students with at least one parent who attained at least a Bachelor’s degree (Lfill, Radford, Wu, Cataldi, Wilson & Hill, 2016). Students’ persistence and achievement have been shown in the past to be significantly affected by financial and informational barriers (Dynarski & Scott-Clayton, 2006; Dynarksi & Scott-Clayton, 2008, Bettinger et al., 2012). However, students also face several psychological barriers during the transition to college—including feelings of social isolation that might especially preclude disadvantaged students from thriving in a new environment (Mendoza-Denton, Purdie-Vaughns, Davis & Pietrzak, 2002). Recent studies, grounded in social-psychological theory, have shown that interventions that bolster students’ social belonging by providing students with non-threatening ways to interpret the initial struggles that most students contend with during the transition to college have significantly narrowed racial achievement gaps in selective private universities (Walton & Cohen, 2007; Walton and Cohen, 2011). Similar interventions have also improved students’ achievement, fulltime enrollment status, and social and academic integration in large, selective, public universities (Yeager et al., in press).  However, are the effects of this social-belonging intervention specific to private and selective public university settings?

We implemented a similar social belonging intervention—to our knowledge, the first of its kind at a broad access, urban public university —designed to bolster students’ social belonging on campus. While we hypothesized that the intervention would have a salutary influence on persistence, it was unclear that this student population (who typically earn lower test scores and high school performance than those examined in previous intervention trials) would show similar effects. The randomized intervention was delivered as an in-class exercise to all first-year students in their writing class (N=1,069). Students completed brief reading and writing exercises: the treatment group reading stories from upperclassmen that encouraged them to attribute early academic and social struggles during their transition to college more productively thereby addressing students’ sense of belonging and the control group read stories from upperclassmen that did not provide such adaptive messages. Results revealed that the social-belonging intervention increased the percentage of ethnic-minority and first-generation college students who maintained continuous enrollment over the next two years by 9 percentage points (i.e., did not skip a term), from 60 percent to 69 percent. It also raised disadvantaged students’ GPA over the subsequent semester by 0.17 points and by 0.07 points over the next two years. Our findings are robust to a number of different specifications—including comparisons to campus-wide comparison groups consisting of cohorts of students who had no exposure to the intervention (i.e., those enrolled prior to and following the year the intervention was administered).