Exploring Costs to Belong Among College Students of Color

• In Event: Belonging at What Cost? Identifying and Regulating Costs of Existing and Persisting in Educational Spaces

Abstract

Objective and Background
School belonging is often seen as a panacea for enhancing college student development and academic outcomes (Fong et al., 2024). However, few empirical studies have focused on understanding how students perceive the costs to belong, or the things students may give up or difficulties they may experience when they try to belong. Particularly in predominantly White institutions or institutions racialized by whiteness, college students of color face additional threats to their belonging (Walton & Cohen, 2007), and, what we argue to be, greater costs to belong. Drawing from literatures on belonging and cost, specifically racialized opportunity cost (Matthews & Wigfield, 2024; Chambers, 2022), our objective was to validate a measure of costs to belong that assessed students’ perceived emotional, psychological, and opportunity costs when trying to belong in college.

Method
A sample of 472 students of color at a large southwestern university (12.7% African American/Black, 42.8% Hispanic/Latino/Chicano, 43.2% Asian), completed a 15-item scale that we developed to assess the perceived costs associated with belonging. This scale included items addressing aspects such as the difficulty, effort, emotional drain, need for authenticity, as well as foregone opportunities. Students also completed measures of demographics, campus belonging, help-seeking, and self-reported GPA. One-third of the sample identified as first-generation and two-thirds identified as women. For our analysis, to examine construct validity, we used principal axis factoring. Multiple regression was performed to examine the predictive validity of the costs to belong scale with a range of outcomes.

Findings
The factor analysis of the costs to belong scale revealed a clear unidimensional structure. A single factor was extracted, which accounted for a substantial 58.21% of the total variance (see Table 1). Scale reliability was .96.

Regarding predictive validity, higher perceived costs to belonging were significantly negatively associated with general belonging (β = -.49), social belonging (β = -.52), academic belonging (β = -.21), instrumental help-seeking (β = -.29), and GPA (β = -.10). These findings consistently indicate that as students perceive a greater cost to belonging, they experience lower levels of overall, social, and academic belonging, engage less in adaptive help-seeking behaviors, and achieve lower academic performance. Conversely, costs to belong was significantly and positively associated with help-seeking avoidance (β = .38) and help-seeking threat (β = .48), suggesting that students who perceive a higher cost to belonging are more inclined to avoid seeking help and feel more threatened by the prospect of doing so.

Significance
This study makes a significant contribution by validating a new costs to belong scale. This novel measure represents an important shift in the field, moving beyond the myriad assessments of belonging (Dias-Broens et al., 2024) to a deeper understanding of the perceived burdens and sacrifices that students, particularly students of color, may experience in their pursuit of belonging within higher education contexts. The findings highlight that higher perceived costs to belong may impede various student outcomes including help-seeking and achievement. By proactively recognizing and mitigating the cost to belong, institutions can more effectively support the holistic development and academic flourishing of diverse student populations.

Authors

• Carlton J. Fong, Texas State University

• Pedram Zarei, Texas State University