New Findings Show Belonging Boosts Mental Health More Than Grades

Introduction

University life brings academic demands on top of the ordinary stresses of daily living, and researchers have documented that this combination can take a toll on student well-being and, in turn, academic performance (van Kessel et al., 2025). Students often struggle with social isolation, language barriers, academic setbacks, and unmet expectations, on top of housing instability, financial strain, and cultural adjustment difficulties. When unpleasant emotions exceed a person’s coping capacity, van Kessel and colleagues (2025) note, overwhelming distress arises, a condition reported at elevated rates among university students internationally. The sense of belonging—the experience of personal involvement in an environment that produces a feeling of being an integral part of it—was described by the authors as one of seven modifiable biopsychosocial domains of health, alongside factors like healthy environments and coping skills. The authors set out to investigate how strongly students’ connection to their institution relates to two outcomes: academic performance and psychological well-being.

Methods

The team conducted a PRISMA-guided systematic review, prospectively registered on PROSPERO, searching six databases through November 2022 (van Kessel et al., 2025). From 2,861 records, 21 papers describing 26 studies met inclusion criteria. Two separate random-effects meta-analyses examined correlations between belonging and grade point average, and between belonging and well-being or psychological distress.

Results

Belonging showed a small-to-medium association with academic outcomes (r = 0.20, k = 10, N = 26,796) and a medium-to-large association with well-being (r = 0.40, k = 18, N = 42,802) (van Kessel et al., 2025). Thee findings show that a stronger sense of belonging at university is reliably associated with better grades and, even more strongly, with better psychological well-being. Fostering belonging may therefore be a more efficient and reliable factor for supporting student mental health rather than for boosting grades. However, these are correlational data—the studies show belonging and outcomes moving together, not that improving belonging causes these improvements.

Discussion

The authors interpret their findings as consistent with theoretical models treating belonging as foundational to well-being. The authors are careful to note that correlational designs cannot lead to claims for causation, even though established theory links belonging as a causal factor of both well-being and performance. They also caution that the review spanned the COVID-19 pandemic, a period marked by widespread adoption of remote learning, suggesting that shifts in learning environments during this period may have influenced belonging’s relationship with student outcomes.

Implications for Mentoring Programs

These findings suggest that mentoring programs designed to build institutional connection may offer benefits for both retention and mental health. Given that the well-being association was notably stronger than the academic one, mentoring efforts that prioritize relational and emotional connection to the university community may deliver greater benefits to student mental health than to grades alone, though both are worth pursuing. Programs targeting first-year students, students living away from home, or those already experiencing distress may be particularly benefit, which is consistent with the authors’ original hypotheses about which student subgroups would show the strongest belonging effects.

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