Using Compassion on Campus – Two Studies
Belonging on Campus: Finding Your People is Easier Said Than Done
In “Find Your People: A Division Wide Collaborative to Improve Student Belonging,” published earlier this year, a team of authors from Mississippi State University research the ties between student sense of belonging and retention, persistence, graduation, and well-being. The authors—Regina Young Hyatt, Andrew Rendon, and Jacqueline Mullen—argue that belonging is not built by a one-time intervention. It takes sustained effort and shared institutional responsibility.
Several Mississippi State University data sources pointed out the same, including results from the National Survey of Student Engagement and Healthy Minds Survey, which showed that up to 30% of students lacked a sense of belonging. A fall 2022 campus climate survey found that 20% of respondents had seriously considered leaving the school, and 48% of them named lack of belonging as the main reason. The student affairs division framed its work around T. L. Strayhorn’s definition of belonging, which centers on feeling connected, cared about, and valued on campus, that he references in “College Students’ Sense of Belonging: A Key to Educational Success for all Students.”
Four primary components constituted the division’s efforts:
- Students as partners. Student government leaders reviewed the data and helped name the campaign, “Find Your People.” Many were surprised that a quarter or more of their peers felt disconnected.
- Staff capacity. Small internal grants paid for two-part workshops. These helped staff interpret the climate data and redesign programs for minoritized students.
- Restructuring. The Division of Student Affairs added an assistant vice president for student experience. That role coordinated student activities, fraternity and sorority life, leadership and community engagement, and the student union around the campaign.
- Campaign launch. Departments and student organizations tagged events “Find Your People” in the event management system and used #findyourpeople on social media. Every event had to include a meet-and-greet component.
Grant funding focused the effort on first-time-in-college students who skipped Mississippi’s two main onboarding routes, the New Maroon Camp pre-college program and fraternity/sorority recruitment. That group was about 1,550 students, nearly half the entering class.
From 3,772 incoming students, the team formed comparison groups. The intervention group was 751 FTIC students with no involvement in any “deep engagement” program, such as athletics, band, or the cultural and scholar programs. In November 2023, staff called, texted, or emailed each of them to ask how they were doing, what plans they had to get involved, and why they had skipped pre-college programs. A separate group of 33 students (21 after exclusions) attended a “Find Your People” resource session. It offered one-on-one consultations with staff and student leaders, lunch, and referrals to matching organizations. Returns from fall to spring were measured on the tenth day of the spring term.
What they found in the results was that 92% of the “Find Your People” session attendees returned for Spring 2024, and that the 751-student outreach group returned at 89%, compared with 93% for all first-time-in-college students.
Their “Find Your People” session attendance was not a significant predictor, and GPA was not included in the model, so the authors could not draw firm conclusions about the outreach. They did note, however, that only individual meetings appeared to help. Finally, students’ reasons for skipping New Maroon Camp included family time, work, cost, scheduling conflicts, and a missed deadline. Students most wanted more information on parking, advising, dining, and housing, plus study and time-management help.
Conclusions
Mississippi State did go on to run a Transfer Student Mixer, a transfer-student focus group, a revived Transfer Student Association, and signage at shuttle stops for commuters. It also added a “Find Your People” speed-dating event in its late-night series and a two-day Transfer New Maroon Camp in 2024. More than 75 events carried the campaign label in academic year 2025.
Looked at together, the team came away with four lessons:
- Lasting belonging takes a coordinated, institution-wide response.
- Useful belonging data often already exists on campus.
- Student leaders are essential partners.
- Transfer students need more study.
Citation:
Find Your People: A Division Wide Collaborative to Improve Student Belonging
Mullen, Rendon & Hyatt, Mississippi State University. New Directions for Higher Education, 2026, pp. 45–50
The Hidden Costs of Caring on Campus
While this study is based solely on university faculty input, the question it asks, “What is the growing emotional work of caring for students costing college faculty?” correlates to the same costs for professional staff on campuses.
The term “compassion fatigue” was first described and coined among social workers and healthcare workers as a way to combine burnout and its symptoms—exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced effectiveness—with secondary traumatic stress, which is the strain of taking in other people’s trauma.
In the paper, “The Hidden Curriculum of Care: Emotional Labor, Burnout, and Compassion Fatigue in Higher Education,” it is noted that the opposite outcome is “compassion satisfaction,” the sense of reward that comes from helping others. The authors argue that with a focus on student success taking a more holistic approach, faculty are now carrying more of this “care labor” burden. The authors point to the pandemic, a student body with more trauma histories and outside responsibilities, and the push toward student-centered, trauma-informed teaching. Most faculty have never been trained for this work.
The study uses a Job Demands–Resources model that treats well-being as a balance between the demands a job places on people and the resources available to meet them. The three demands studied using the model were exposure to student trauma; student-related stressors, such as arguing, criticism, unrealistic expectations and entitlement; and emotional dissonance: hiding negative feelings like irritation or performing positive feelings like enthusiasm and empathy that one doesn’t feel.
The resources were perceived organizational support and five types of self-care: professional support, professional development, life balance, cognitive awareness, and daily balance.
The team—Carrie Boden (Texas State University), Angela Girdley (Baylor University), Amy Benton (Samford University), and Kandi Pomeroy (Alamo Colleges)—recruited faculty with at least one year of teaching experience at regionally accredited institutions, mainly through LinkedIn. The final sample was 468 faculty. Of these, 83% were full-time, 59% were women, and 75% were White, with an even split between tenure-line and non-tenure-track faculty. Using hierarchical regression, the authors added age, then each demand, then organizational support, then self-care. They tested how each step predicted burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion satisfaction.
It turned out that demands did hurt overall well-being, as student-related stressors were the strongest single demand. They predicted more burnout and secondary traumatic stress and lower compassion satisfaction.
Also of note, trauma exposure works in an unexpected way. On its own, supporting students through trauma predicted more burnout, but once student-related stressors were accounted for, trauma no longer predicted burnout. It became a modest positive predictor of compassion satisfaction. In other words, the difficult interactions surrounding trauma drive exhaustion more than helping traumatized students does. The authors call trauma a “challenge demand,” meaningful and motivating but draining if sustained without recovery.
They also found that when faculty suppressed negative emotions, it raised burnout and lowered satisfaction. So masking emotions costs faculty; performing positive emotions was the strongest predictor of secondary traumatic stress and raised burnout.
Resources help, but only partly. Organizational support reduced burnout and increased satisfaction. Among the self-care types, professional development and life balance reduced burnout, and cognitive awareness also raised satisfaction. Neither organizational support nor self-care reduced secondary traumatic stress. That gap suggests individual coping and general institutional goodwill can’t fully offset the effects of absorbing students’ trauma.
Implications
The authors warn of “mission creep,” as institutions mandate student-centered and trauma-informed care without adding training or structural support to match.
They recommend:
- Trauma-responsive resources for staff, such as counseling, secondary-trauma training, and peer support networks
- Fair workload distribution and stronger leadership development
- Less reliance on student evaluations in personnel decisions
- Training in boundary-setting, conflict resolution, and emotional regulation
- Transparent grievance procedures
- Student orientation programs that set expectations for academic civility
Relevance to Student Affairs and Professional Staff
The study surveyed only faculty, but its findings apply directly to student affairs. The trauma-exposure measure was adapted from Lynch and Glass’s scale of secondary trauma among student affairs professionals. That scale comes from earlier research showing that staff in advising, residence life, conduct, case management, and campus activities face the same exposure. Several recommendations also fall to student affairs divisions, including orientation norms on civility, counseling capacity, and peer-support structures. Faculty increasingly direct struggling students to these offices, and some of the same strain lands there in turn. The finding that self-care and organizational support didn’t reduce secondary traumatic stress is a caution for divisions that rely mainly on wellness programming to sustain their own staff.
Citation
The Hidden Curriculum of Care: Emotional Labor, Burnout, and Compassion Fatigue in Higher Education
Boden, Girdley, Benton & Pomeroy. Innovative Higher Education, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-026-09882-9
