What helps students from all walks of life have a good college experience?

Beyond all the concrete things schools can offer – academics, research opportunities, sports, dining halls – is something both basic and hard to define: a sense of belonging.

Factors such as race and gender can influence how at home a student feels on campus, contributing to their overall well-being. But my research highlights the role of religion and spirituality, too: how support for students’ worldviews – whether they’re deeply religious, atheist or somewhere in between – shapes their campus experience.

My recent scholarship with fellow higher education professor Musbah Shaheen argues that a sense of belonging arises mainly from meaningful relationships and conversations about those topics, not from simply having religious clubs and organizations on campus.

With that in mind, we believe universities can move beyond tolerance toward real appreciation for all students, including religious minorities.

This recent work builds on results from the Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey, or IDEALS. In 2014, higher education researcher Alyssa N. Rockenbach and I designed the project in partnership with Interfaith America, a nonprofit that encourages interfaith dialogue on campus. Running from 2015 to 2019, it surveyed 3,486 students across 122 campuses to understand the ways colleges could support students’ well-being when it comes........

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