“Figuring out your place at a school like this:” Intersectionality and sense of belonging among STEM and non-STEM college students

by Sarah M. Ovink, W. Carson Byrd, Megan Nanney, Abigail Wilson

Students’ sense of belonging in college—an individual’s feelings of contentment, mattering, importance, and “finding one’s place” in a social setting—can influence choice of major and career trajectory. We contribute to the belongingness literature through a mixed methods intersectional study of students attending a STEM-focused public university we call Meadow State University (MSU). We assess the potential for students’ intersecting social identities to differentially influence their experiences with intersectional oppression—subjection to multiple systems of oppression due to simultaneous membership in more than one marginalized group—that, in turn, may influence their college pathways. In addition, we explore whether intersectional differences affect sense of belonging differently in STEM and non-STEM majors. We employ a mixed-methods approach, informed by critical quantitative methods and in-depth interviews. We utilize quantitative institutional data measuring college satisfaction, expressed as “willingness to return” to the same university, for over 3,000 students during two academic years (2013–14 and 2016–17). Survey data explores college satisfaction as an indicator of intersectional differences in student experiences. Then, we analyze 37 in-depth interviews, collected between 2014–2016 at the same institution, to further contextualize the intersectional variation suggested by survey results.

Willingness to return is influenced by major, as well as academic, social, and campus belonging. Moreover, the extent to which these factors affected outcomes additionally varied by race/ethnicity, gender, family income, other background factors, and the ways these factors may intersect. Important components of academic belonging included faculty-student interactions, perceptions of academic support, and a privileging of STEM degree programs and students over non-STEM students and their degree programs at MSU. Faculty responsiveness and high impact practices like internships played an important role, particularly in STEM programs. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that, particularly for students of color and those subject to intersectional oppression due to multiple marginalized identities, satisfaction with academics did not always outweigh deficiencies in other areas of campus life shaping belongingness.

Our mixed-methods approach contributes insights into how and why students’ background, individual choices, and institutional practices concurrently—and intersectionally—influence their ability to form a sense of belonging on campus. Structural changes are required to end practices that support intersecting systems of oppression by favoring White, upper-income men as the “default” STEM students in the U.S. Our research supports growing evidence that institutions must actively build models of inclusion for underrepresented and marginalized groups that address inequitable and unjust practices, providing transformative mentoring and educational guidance that attends to intersectional oppression, in order to effectively support the next generation of women and scholars of color.