Most colleges measure belonging through surveys.
On a February morning at Morehouse College, Sitovea Williams noticed a student who looked overwhelmed. She wasn’t his professor, an academic advisor, or a counselor. She works in the college’s accounting department, where much of her day is spent helping students navigate the financial side of college life. Still, something about the student’s demeanor gave her pause.
Later that day, Williams sent him an email.
“When I saw you this morning,” she wrote, “I wished that there was something I could do in that moment to lift your spirits.” She shared words of encouragement, told him she had prayed for him, and reminded him that he was not alone. The email offered no quick solutions and no promises that everything would suddenly be okay. It simply acknowledged that someone had seen his struggle and cared enough to reach out.
Hours later, the student responded.
“Thank you for praying for me in my hour of need,” he wrote. “Your words of encouragement have given me strength. I was able to think with a more calm and collected head after we spoke.”
This one exchange between a staff member and a student cannot explain why Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) consistently report stronger feelings of belonging than higher education as a whole. Research is built on patterns, not individual moments. But stories like this reveal what those patterns look like in practice.
Across the country, colleges and universities continue grappling with a student mental health crisis. Institutions have expanded counseling centers, hired more therapists, launched wellness initiatives, and invested in telehealth and digital mental health platforms. Those efforts are both necessary and overdue. Yet even as campuses devote increasing resources to treatment and crisis intervention, another question deserves equal attention: What helps students feel like they matter before they ever reach a point of crisis?
That question sits at the heart of the HBCU Mental Health Survey, conducted by The Steve Fund, UNCF, and the Healthy Minds Network. While the report documents many of the same mental health challenges affecting students across higher education, it also highlights a meaningful difference in how students experience their campus communities.
The survey found that 83% of those attending HBCUs and Predominantly Black Institutions reported a strong sense of belonging, compared with 73% of students nationally. Nearly 45% were classified as flourishing, compared with only 36% of students across higher education.
The findings do not suggest that HBCU students experience fewer mental health challenges. Forty percent screened positive for depression, 32% for anxiety, 17% reported suicidal ideation, and 9% screened were at risk for an eating disorder. Like students everywhere, they navigate financial pressures, academic demands, family responsibilities, and uncertainty about the future.
The difference is not the absence of struggle; it is the presence of connection.
Researchers increasingly recognize belonging as a protective factor associated with persistence, help-seeking, academic engagement, and overall well-being. Feeling connected cannot eliminate hardship, but it can influence how students experience it and whether they feel supported enough to seek help when they need it.
If belonging has such a profound impact on student well-being, the question becomes not whether it matters, but how institutions create it.
Although Williams works outside traditional student support services, she doesn’t see caring for them as something separate from her job.
“Implicitly, yes,” she said when asked whether supporting students is part of her responsibility. “The mission of Morehouse College is to develop men with disciplined minds who will lead lives of leadership and service. I agreed to that mission when I accepted my job offer, and a foundation to achieving that mission is care.”
For her, this isn’t an extra responsibility layered onto her position. It is woven into it. Every employee, regardless of title, contributes to the environment students experience each day.
That perspective reflects one of the survey’s central themes. Students who reported stronger feelings of belonging also described their campuses as places where they felt supported, respected, and connected. Rather than viewing mental health solely through the lens of treatment, the findings suggest that campus culture itself plays an important role in their well-being.
Mental health services remain essential, but HBCUs point toward an additional lesson. Counseling alone cannot create belonging.
Belonging is built long before a student schedules an appointment. It develops when faculty members learn their names, when advisors recognize that a missed meeting may signal something deeper than poor time management, when financial aid staff understand that conversations about tuition often carry emotional weight, and when employees across campus see students as people before they see them as records, account numbers, or graduation statistics.
Those moments rarely appear in institutional dashboards, yet they shape how students experience college every day. For many, an HBCU is more than a place to earn a degree. It is an environment where identity is affirmed rather than questioned, where cultural experiences are reflected in classrooms and campus traditions, and where they often encounter faculty and staff who see their success as a shared responsibility.
That does not mean every student’s experience is the same, nor does it suggest that HBCUs are without challenges. These institutions continue to navigate limited resources, financial pressures, and growing demand for mental health services. The HBCU Mental Health Survey makes that clear.
A student who believes they belong may be more willing to ask for help, confide in a trusted faculty member, lean on classmates, or visit a counseling center before a crisis escalates. Those relationships cannot replace professional mental health care, but they can make it easier for students to access that care in the first place.
One of higher education’s most common assumptions is that student well-being belongs primarily to counseling centers or student affairs divisions. The reality is that well-being is an institutional responsibility.
Culture is often discussed in broad terms, but students experience it through ordinary interactions. They experience it when someone remembers their name or asks how they’re doing and genuinely waits for the answer. When they feel safe enough to admit they are struggling or when they believe there are people on campus who are invested not only in their academic success, but in their well-being as human beings.
Those moments communicate something no marketing campaign or orientation program can manufacture: They tell students they belong.
By expanding access to counseling and other mental health resources, HBCUs remind us that support does not begin when a student reaches a therapist’s office. It begins much earlier. For colleges looking to strengthen student well-being, the lesson is not that every institution should try to replicate the HBCU experience. The history, mission, and cultural significance of HBCUs are unique. Their legacy was forged through generations of educating, empowering, and affirming Black students in ways that many other institutions never had to consider.
What can be replicated, however, is the intentionality behind their culture. Culture is not built through a single initiative. It is built through people.
For Williams, that philosophy is neither revolutionary nor extraordinary. It is simply part of the commitment she made when she accepted her position at Morehouse College. Caring for students is not separate from her work. It is central to it.
“Our job, no matter what our titles are, is to graduate students,” said Williams. “We must care about the things that impact them in graduating: intellectually, socially, financially, physically, spiritually, emotionally, and environmentally. Supporting their wellness holistically is simply a part of the job.”
The email she sent that February morning did not solve the student’s problems. It wasn’t meant to. What it offered was something every student deserves: the reassurance that someone saw them, cared enough to reach out, and believed they mattered.
Higher education has spent years asking how it can better respond when students are struggling. The experiences of HBCU students invite a different question. What kind of campus do we create when every employee believes that caring for students is part of the job?
