Students’ belongingness is not a concept foreign to St. Cloud State University (SCSU) with multiple studies undertaken by different departments over the last few years (Westbrook, 2021; Wittrock, 2017). While so, the belongingness of international graduate students has not been measured previously or been a focus area at St. Cloud State perhaps because
international graduate students constituted less than 4% of the total student population measured at SCSU’s last census in the Fall of 2021 (Enrollment Profile, 2021). International students have undergone tremendous duress over the past few years as they have faced isolation not only because most classes were moved to an online model but also because they were tested as their families battled COVID-19 without them with most countries on lockdowns and travel bans in place due to the pandemic. Given our positionality of being graduate international students ourselves and/or having worked with this population in some capacity, we have observed that this community is also experiencing more alienation compared to international undergraduate and doctoral students from the campus community. We think that this can be attributed to the shorter length of a degree program, balancing concurrent commitments to graduate assistantships with academics and securing additional sources of income to fund their education - which are added stressors. Graduate students are continuing to undergo financial hardships as the deficit between cost of attending college and tuition remission through graduate assistantships are continuing to get steeper, especially with an increase in extraneous costs such as housing, groceries and healthcare in the St. Cloud area (Kocher, 2020). The international graduate student population is therefore an important one to explore because it sits at the intersection of international and graduate student populations.
For the purposes of this assessment, belongingness is understood to be a positive association that a student forms with their campus community which harbors a sense of security (Nunn, 2021). Even so, as highlighted by Nunn (2021), it is important to note that campus-community belonging is nuanced and is in fact a combination of a student’s social belonging and academic belonging. When defining belonging, it is also crucial to point out that the absence of belonging is not necessarily the same as loneliness as noted by Brunsting et al. (2021). They also found that international students fostered greater feelings of belonging when they felt more connected with their domestic counterparts. This is a concept we intend to explore through our assessment because this contradicts SCSU’s newly created Division of Student Affairs' understanding that international students are more likely to thrive if they are able to remain connected with students with a similar cultural background to their own (K. Rodriguez, personal communication, September 26, 2022).
Along those lines, another factor that contributed to graduate students’ increased sense of belonging was found by Curtin, Stewart, and Ostrove (2013) to be students’ relationship with their faculty. Although this may be true for doctoral students, this may not be the case for master’s students because they tend to have shorter programs with less reliance on faculty to complete graduation requirements. Therefore, we added faculty relationships as a factor that we would like to study the effects of on graduate students’ sense of belonging as part of our project.
On the other hand, we were also interested in learning about what factors constitute lower belongingness to understand interventions that could be helpful for SCSU’s Division of Student Affairs to consider. Matheson and Sutcliffe (2018) found that participants in their study self-eliminated themselves from the data collection process if they found language to be a barrier. This was important for us to investigate because SCSU does have an English proficiency requirement (English proficiency requirements, n.d.), but it does not take into consideration the effects of other impediments that international students face such as accents, regional dialects, and vocabulary. Hence, making it a fascinating variable for us to probe into our students’ sense of belonging through our project.
Taking the above information into account, the purpose of this assessment project was to understand the belongingness of minoritized student population of graduate international students at St. Cloud State University. For this study, an explanatory sequential mixed methods design was used which involves collecting quantitative data first and then explaining the quantitative results with in-depth qualitative data on participants who consent (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). A quantitative approach was used to test the hypotheses:
Graduate students’ belongingness is informed by three variables: (a) faculty relationship; (b) student organization involvement; and (c) institutional financial support.
Graduate students’ sense of belongingness affects their academic outcomes - measured by GPA and retention.
In the first quantitative phase of the study, survey data was collected from international graduate students at St. Cloud State University to assess whether faculty relationships, student organizational involvement, and institutional financial support related to their sense of belonging on campus. To further investigate the effects of student programming, campus jobs, English language proficiency, housing, and other factors that contribute to a graduate international student’s belongingness, individual interviews were conducted with participants who responded to the survey indicating their interest to participate in the second phase of the project’s data collection process.
To guide our assessment, the following research questions grounded our work as we embarked on journey to investigate the concept of belongingness amongst international graduate students:
What factors influence an international graduate student’s sense of belonging at SCSU?
How does an international graduate student’s sense of belonging affect their academic outcome?
What actions/initiatives at SCSU would contribute to increasing an international graduate student’s belongingness?
The rationale behind using a mixed methodology was that we wanted to encourage maximum participation for the first phase of the data collection process so that we could identify any trends that emerge that could be generalized. The second qualitative phase was conducted as a follow-up to the quantitative results to help further explain the quantitative results based on students’ experiences and testimonies. For this phase of the data collection process, our goal was to give power to the individual voices of each of our participants and delve deeper to understand their individualized experiences with belonging and its effects on their academic outcomes. In this exploratory follow-up, we explored factors that affected the sense of belonging of international graduate students at St. Cloud State University. We also developed a deeper understanding of initiatives or areas of improvement that the students identified to increase their belongingness.