Inside the Viewfinder® Dashboards
Higher education leaders now have an unprecedented view into how students, faculty, and staff experience campus life across the United States. The Viewfinder® National Campus Climate Dashboards (NCCDs), developed by Viewfinder® Campus Climate Surveys, bring together the most extensive database of campus climate survey results ever assembled, transforming six years of institutional survey data into an interactive research tool.
“This is the first national data repository of campus climate data,” said Gabriel Reif, PhD, vice president of research and evaluation at Viewfinder® Campus Climate Surveys. “We pulled together information from nearly 150 college campuses, including both student and employee surveys. Altogether, the dataset represents 200,000 respondents.”
From Local Snapshots to a National Picture
Until now, campus climate studies were largely confined to individual institutions and benchmarking against a limited set of peers. Colleges could gauge perceptions of belonging or inclusion internally, but there was no reliable way to compare findings or identify national trends. With the launch of the NCCDs, drawing on data collected from 2017 to 2025, researchers can benchmark progress, uncover disparities, and examine questions that were previously impossible to answer.
The dashboards include responses from more than 120,000 students and 90,000 employees, covering campus experiences ranging from safety and acceptance to overall satisfaction. Users can filter the data by single or multiple demographics, role, institution type, or region, enabling detailed analysis of specific identity groups or workplace categories. Reif said the system’s ease of use and flexibility is one of its greatest strengths.
What the Data Reveal
Early reports drawn from the dashboards reveal several pressing issues shaping campus life nationwide. The following four free reports can be found online at campusclimatesurveys.com/national-campus-climate-data.
Antisemitism and Campus Climate
The report found that Jewish students experience lower levels of comfort, safety, and respect compared to peers of other faiths. More than one in five Jewish students (20.4%) said they could not openly express their religious beliefs, and nearly one in five (18.9%) said their beliefs were not respected by other students—about double the rate of their Muslim or Christian peers. Over a third (37.6%) reported encountering microaggressions on campus.
The report recommends that institutions work proactively with religious leaders, administrators, and students to co-create solutions—such as listening sessions, policy reviews, and greater holiday accommodations—to foster safety and belonging for Jewish students.
Drivers of Employee Discontent on College Campuses
This analysis reveals widespread dissatisfaction among higher-education employees. Roughly 61% of faculty and 63% of staff said they were underpaid, while nearly two-thirds of all respondents believed pay disparities exist at their institutions. Faculty and administrators also cited excessive workloads and inconsistent professional-conduct standards.
“These results highlight systemic challenges that can erode trust, morale, and retention,” the report concludes, urging campuses to conduct regular compensation reviews, expand professional-development funding, and ensure transparent promotion and evaluation processes.
The Compounding Effect
The study provides one of the clearest statistical illustrations of how overlapping marginalized identities compound challenges to belonging. Nationally, just over half of students (53.9%) said they felt a strong sense of belonging. Among students with a non-Christian spiritual affiliation, that rate dropped to 45.7% and fell further, to 40%, for those who also received Pell Grants.
A similar pattern appeared in perceptions of safety: while 82.7% of students overall felt safe on campus, only 71.4% of students of color with non-Christian spiritual affiliations who were also Pell Grant recipients said the same. The findings underscore the need for intersectional approaches to inclusion that address how multiple aspects of identity—race, religion, disability, gender, and socioeconomic status—interact to shape campus experience.
Contrasting Perceptions of Political Expression
Differing political identities also emerged as a significant factor in how students and employees experience campus life. According to the data, just 28.6% of conservative students and 18.4% of conservative employees said they could openly express their political views at their institutions, compared with 70.6% of liberal students and 53.4% of liberal employees. Similar gaps appeared in whether respondents felt their views were respected.
Despite these differences, conservative and liberal respondents reported comparable levels of overall satisfaction with their institutions, suggesting that discomfort with expression does not necessarily translate into general dissatisfaction. The report recommends that colleges promote open dialogue through structured forums and faculty training on navigating political diversity.
From Data to Direction
“The results reflect how people are actually experiencing campus life—a valuable pulse check from your constituents. At the national level, we’re looking at those constituents across all of higher education,” Reif said.
Each of the reports were based on current critical topics in higher education and includes actionable recommendations, from pay-equity reviews and interfaith programming to strategies for improving dialogue across ideological divides. Reif said the aim is to help leaders translate quantitative data into informed decisions that support inclusion, recruitment and retention, and morale.
“All of the reports include recommendations,” he explained. “There have been some really innovative developments in higher education over the past few decades, and I’m a huge proponent of intergroup dialogue as a way to bring people from different backgrounds and perspectives together. … It’s about institutional leaders being aware of those practices and prioritizing them.”
Building Inclusive and Informed Campuses
“Inclusivity means everyone—including people who have felt marginalized in higher education in recent decades,” he said.
By illuminating how students and employees experience campus life across hundreds of institutions, the NCCDs offer a new evidence base for building belonging. The dashboards allow users to benchmark their own data against national norms, drill down into specific populations, and export custom reports for presentations and strategic planning.
A New Era of Evidence-Based Leadership
Reif credits advances in data science and Viewfinder’s comprehensive campus climate survey instruments for making the project possible.
“With new data science tools like Tableau Software, it was only a matter of time before something like this could be executed,” he said. “Campus climate surveys have been happening for years—thousands of colleges have conducted them— but data science strategies hadn’t been applied to this space before. … We know we’re working with valid data as we build these dashboards and the repository behind them.”
In an era when campus leaders face heightened pressure to demonstrate progress on belonging, retention, and trust, the NCCDs translate thousands of individual voices into a national conversation.
