Editor’s Note:
A couple of weeks ago, we explored how digital tools can quietly limit students’ perceptions of what colleges are possible. Erica, a rural valedictorian, trusted algorithms that narrowed her options without her knowledge. But what happens after students navigate these misleading maps and arrive on campus?
This week, we follow Arya, a first-generation student from urban Tacoma, as she steps onto a campus that promises transformation but delivers quiet exclusion. Her story reveals how institutional silence and cultural disconnect can erode a student’s sense of belonging, even at universities that claim inclusion as a core value.
As higher education faces technological and political crosscurrents in 2025, Arya’s journey from just a few years ago now seems eerily prophetic. Her experience reveals not just individual resilience, but the urgent need for truly inclusive educational communities – places where all students can find soil to grow.
~Dr. G
Navigating Belonging in Unmapped Territory
The acceptance letter arrived like a key to a promised land. In Tacoma, Washington, Arya had cultivated her identity as student body president at one of the most diverse high schools in the region. Her school celebrated multiculturalism, hosting annual assemblies that honored Samoan, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Filipino cultures. “We have like a huge multicultural assembly every year showing people’s cultures,” she recalled. “Samoan, Cambodian, Vietnamese, all very different.” Difference wasn’t merely tolerated; it was cherished. Her walls displayed leadership awards; her phone buzzed constantly with messages from classmates and community members seeking her guidance. She knew everyone; everyone knew her.
The university’s glossy brochures promised something beyond credentials: a place where she would continue to flourish, to develop as a whole person. But soil matters. And some campuses, Arya would discover, promise a garden but nurture only select seeds.
“I did some research on the school’s mission. I really liked their core values. They talked about how they really value the development of a person, which really stood out to me,” she explained. “Of course, college, the main purpose is to get your degree. But I don’t think it’s all about the degree. I do believe that it’s about the development of a person.”
Months later, sitting alone in her dorm room, Arya stared at her phone. No messages. No invitations. Her voice grew quiet as she recounted: “I had no clue what I was getting myself into. I just thought that I was going to be a part of new clubs and meet a lot of new people, but really, I wasn’t meeting a lot of people like I thought I would. I feel like the connections that I did make, they’re very real, so I’m really grateful for that. But yeah, I had the expectation that I was going to be a lot more involved.”
In high school, social connection had seemed effortless. On campus, it felt like trying to decode an unfamiliar language with no translation dictionary. Unlike Erica from rural Eastern Washington, whose options were narrowed by digital algorithms, Arya had charted her own path to college. “I didn’t care where I was going to go to in California. I just wanted to go to school in California,” she had explained. Drawn to mission statements about “the development of a person,” she had followed her aspirations with limited guidance. But the glossy brochures and inspiring websites revealed nothing about the invisible boundaries and unspoken codes that would determine her sense of belonging.
College was not the place where she blossomed. College was the place where her confidence in herself was shaken.
The Promise and the Silence
For some students, college represents a seamless extension of privilege. Their grandparents went to college; their parents went to college; their older siblings went to college. The environment reflects their cultural norms, celebrates their historical figures, and reinforces their worldview. They move through campus like natives rather than visitors, instinctively understanding which doors will open for them and how to navigate the social landscape.
For Arya and many first-generation students from marginalized backgrounds, the experience is fundamentally different. We’ve long known that “working-class first-generation college undergraduates often experience stark, emotionally taxing feelings of isolation on predominantly White campuses.” This isolation isn’t simply social discomfort – it represents a profound cultural mismatch that carries real psychological costs.
The struggle begins with what seems obvious: U.S. colleges emphasize independence, self-promotion, and individual achievement. These values, often presented as universal or neutral, actually reflect specific cultural norms. For students socialized in communities that prioritize interdependence, family obligation, and collective success, this mismatch can create daily psychological friction that drains energy and undermines confidence.
“The university was very affluent, a lot of money. Clearly it was a predominantly white campus. Predominantly white professors, too,” Arya reflected. As she would later describe, it simply didn’t feel like a place where she could grow.
Each day brought reminders of difference. “I would see Maseratis on campus every day,” she noted, the luxury cars signaling a wealth gap that extended beyond economics into cultural understanding. Walking across the manicured quad, surrounded by peers whose connections had been cultivated across generations, Arya felt increasingly like a visitor in a strange land rather than a full citizen of her university.
The disconnect between institutional marketing and lived reality grows wider each year. Universities showcase diversity in viewbooks while dismantling the very support structures that make belonging possible. They celebrate inclusion in mission statements while allowing hostile environments to persist. When confronted with evidence of exclusion, their responses often prioritize image over substantive change – a pattern that became painfully clear to Arya during her first semester.
When Digital Whispers Become Roars
The message appeared on Arya’s phone late one night through an anonymous social media app called Yik Yak: a racial slur directed at Black students, followed by comments questioning their right to be on campus at all. Similar posts had been appearing for weeks, creating an atmosphere of growing hostility.
For Arya, the impact went beyond the offensive content: “Even when I read the racist comments in my dorm, I would feel uncomfortable because it could have been anyone in my living unit writing those comments.”
This uncertainty created a profound sense of vigilance. Not knowing which classmates, neighbors, or potential friends might secretly harbor such views changed everything. Each social interaction now carried the weight of potential rejection. Each classroom discussion risked revealing bias. The psychological burden of this constant assessment doesn’t appear in any college ranking or viewbook, but it fundamentally shapes the educational experience of students from marginalized backgrounds.
When the Black Student Union responded by presenting a list of demands for institutional change, the backlash intensified. “I remember posts on Yik Yak saying that they had a problem with the word ‘demand,’” Arya recalled. “It makes me wonder if it had been a different club, would the student body have had the same uproar? Are Black students not able to want more for themselves and others? It was extremely disheartening.”
The university’s response proved equally disheartening. “It was disappointing to see how the Yik Yak situation was handled. The president addressed the issue in an email but did nothing to change the problem,” Arya explained. “Recognizing the issue via email was not and did not feel like enough.”
This pattern of institutional silence in the face of exclusion represents more than administrative failure. It fundamentally undermines trust in the institution itself. When universities market themselves as inclusive communities while failing to protect students from harassment, they create not just disappointment but a profound rupture in the educational covenant.
Some might argue that building resilience requires confronting adversity, that universities shouldn’t shield students from difficult or even brutal realities. But this perspective misses a critical distinction: there’s a difference between productive intellectual challenge and the corrosive effects of exclusion. Energy spent surviving can’t also be spent learning. Institutions lose too, sacrificing the diverse voices they claim to value.
The Inner Cost of Exclusion
The experience of belonging uncertainty carries costs that remain largely invisible to those who’ve never felt them. Each social rejection, each instance of cultural mismatch, each moment of institutional silence accumulates not just externally but internally, creating what spiritual traditions might recognize as a wound to the spirit itself.
For Arya, this manifested physically: “I was really anxious all the time. I didn’t really know why.” The research confirms her experience isn’t unique. We know how “facing a culturally-mismatched environment can lead to a generally aversive psychological state that can alter biological functioning, resulting in anxiety and stereotype threat.”
This anxiety doesn’t simply affect emotional wellbeing. It disrupts learning itself. When students constantly question whether they belong, their cognitive resources become divided between academic tasks and monitoring their social status. The resulting performance gaps aren’t evidence of ability differences but of the unequal psychological burden placed on students from marginalized backgrounds.
The spiritual dimension of this exclusion appears in Arya’s metaphors. Campus became not a garden for growth but a place “where I couldn’t grow.” Not a path to development but a barrier to becoming. This language reveals how belonging uncertainty affects not just what students can do but who they can become.
After two years, Arya made the difficult decision to transfer to a community college closer to home. This choice is often misinterpreted as failure but it’s better understood as agency. “Deciding to leave their resource-rich institutions for more diverse community colleges closer to home may have been the right choice,” research suggests, though it comes with trade-offs in terms of resources and credentials.
Technology as Witness or Warden?
If Arya were entering college in 2025 rather than 2016, her experience would be shaped not just by human interactions but by increasingly pervasive algorithmic ones. In the decade since she first stepped onto campus, higher education has witnessed profound shifts: the 2023 Supreme Court decision ending race-conscious admissions, widespread defunding of DEI offices, and the replacement of human support with AI systems that promise efficiency but also deliver surveillance. What Arya experienced in isolation has become institutionalized at scale.
Today’s campuses deploy increasingly sophisticated technologies to monitor student engagement, predict success, and ostensibly support a sense of belonging. Some offer “belonging interventions” through mobile apps that prompt social connections or track participation. Others use predictive analytics to identify students at risk of departure before they themselves recognize warning signs.
These systems promise efficiency and support, but they often function more as surveillance than care. They track attendance, monitor study habits, and analyze social patterns but rarely capture the qualitative experience of exclusion that drove students like Arya to leave. Arya’s attendance might be flagged by software, but her loneliness wouldn’t register in the system.
The problem lies not in technology itself but in what it measures. Current systems prioritize metrics visible to institutions (grades, attendance, retention) while overlooking what matters to students (meaningful connection, cultural validation, psychological safety). When belonging becomes a metric rather than a lived experience, interventions address symptoms rather than causes.
More troubling still is how these systems can reproduce the very exclusion they claim to solve. Predictive models trained on historical data often inherit and amplify existing patterns of bias. When systems designed to support “at-risk” students disproportionately flag those from marginalized backgrounds, they create stigma rather than inclusion. The surveillance itself becomes another burden, another reminder of difference.
True belonging interventions would address not just individual behavior but institutional environments. They would measure not just student engagement but institutional responsiveness. They would recognize that although campuses do offer programmatic resources targeting first-generation and non-White students, their mere presence is not enough.
Institutions may need to do more to help students access and engage. They would move beyond brochures and support centers toward redesigning classroom norms, hiring practices, advising structures, and power-sharing with students themselves. Inclusion isn’t a program – it’s a principle that reshapes the whole system.
Finding Soil to Grow
Arya’s journey didn’t end with her departure from the university. After transferring to a community college, she found an environment where she could flourish, where belonging wasn’t just promised but practiced. This wasn’t mere chance but the result of intentional institutional choices to create inclusive environments that support diverse students.
Her experience reveals something essential about belonging: it doesn’t simply happen through proximity. It requires reciprocity between student and institution, a mutual recognition of value and contribution. When universities recruit students from diverse backgrounds without adapting their environments to support them, they set up a dynamic of extraction rather than exchange.
Yet Arya’s story also contains hope. Her resilience in seeking an environment where she could thrive represents not failure but agency. Her ability to name what was missing, to recognize the gap between institutional promise and practice, reflects a wisdom that institutions themselves often lack.
“The development of a person,” the phrase that once drew Arya in, came to mean something far more radical. She had developed, yes, but by choosing an environment where her growth was possible rather than accepting institutional silence that stifled her.
As campuses increasingly rely on technology to address belonging, Arya’s experience offers an important counterpoint: algorithms may track engagement, but they cannot create community. Data may measure retention, but it cannot nurture growth. True belonging emerges not from monitoring but from relationship – from environments where students see themselves reflected not just in marketing materials, but in the institution’s values, practices, and power.
The path forward requires institutions to move beyond performative inclusion to structural change. It demands not just individual interventions but environmental transformation. And it begins with listening to students like Arya, whose journeys through strange lands reveal not just their resilience but our collective failure to create truly inclusive educational communities.
For students navigating campus environments in 2025, the challenge remains: how to find a sense of belonging in spaces not designed with them in mind. What does it say about our institutions that, even as higher education is criticized for being too progressive, students like Arya still experience the quiet exclusion of traditions that seldom change?
But the social terrain of campus represents just one dimension of the strange lands students must navigate. Beyond learning to belong, they must also decipher the hidden academic languages that determine success, languages some students inherit while others must translate in real-time. That story – the hidden curriculum – continues next week.
As always, many thanks for reading. I invite your comments.
Dr. G