This article was co-authored by Dawn Rolling, Director of Design/Senior Architect/Principal, and Amy VanDerWerf Carroll, AVP, Student Success.
College and university leaders spend a lot of time thinking about their campus facilities. Which buildings need renovation? Where do we need more capacity? How can we make better use of the spaces we already have? How can we right-size our campus without compromising the student experience?
Those questions matter. But they are not the only questions campus planning should answer.
Students do not experience a campus as a collection of buildings. They experience it as the place where they learn, build relationships, find support, and decide whether they belong.
And those experiences matter for student success. So how can campus spaces support student belonging and retention?
By making it easier for students to connect with one another, participate in campus life, find safe spaces where they feel comfortable and supported, and access the resources they need to succeed.
Doing that well requires campus planning and student success teams to work together, combining an understanding of how spaces function with an understanding of how students experience them.
The goal is not to assume that a new building or renovation will automatically improve retention. It is to make campus planning part of a broader conversation about student experience, belonging, and persistence.
Key Takeaways
- Campus spaces can support student belonging by making it easier for students to connect, participate, and access support.
- Residence halls, gathering spaces, pathways, academic buildings, and recreation areas all shape how students experience campus.
- Campus planning should be connected to broader student success and retention goals, not treated only as a facilities exercise.
- Institutions should evaluate campus spaces using space performance assessments and post-design impact evaluations, along with student feedback, engagement, accessibility, and persistence data.
- Physical space alone does not cause higher retention, but it can support the conditions that help students feel connected and able to succeed.
How Do Campus Spaces Influence Student Belonging and Retention?
Student belonging is often treated as a student affairs responsibility. We think about orientation, student organizations, residence life, and programs designed to help students build connections.
But students also experience belonging in the spaces between those programs.
They experience it when they have somewhere comfortable to spend time between classes, where they feel safe, welcome, and heard. When academic support is easy to find and access. When gathering spaces feel welcoming. When they can participate in campus activities without navigating unnecessary barriers.
And they experience the opposite when those opportunities are missing.
A residential first-year student may have several natural opportunities to connect with peers throughout the day. An off-campus student may attend classes and leave without having a convenient place to study, eat, or socialize with peers and faculty.
Both attend the same institution. They may experience it very differently. Accessibility, cultural representation, comfort, safety, and whether spaces feel welcoming can all shape a student’s sense of belonging and how they experience the institution.
That distinction is important.
If we want to improve student belonging, we need to understand where students are finding connection and where the campus environment may be making it more difficult.
Belonging cannot be created by a building. But campus spaces can make belonging easier or harder to experience.
What Types of Campus Spaces Support Student Connection?
There is no single type of space that creates belonging. Different students need different environments, and the value of a space depends on how it supports their everyday experience.
Residence Halls and Shared Living Spaces
For residential students, housing is often where their earliest campus relationships develop.
Shared study areas, comfortable common spaces, and convenient connections to dining, academics, and recreation can create opportunities for interaction and shared activities that help build community, whether students are studying, cooking, eating, or simply spending time together.
But students also need privacy and quiet. Residence halls can shape both the academic and social experience, so how buildings support interaction, privacy, and community matters just as much as the number of beds they provide.
Informal Gathering and Study Spaces
Not every meaningful student interaction happens during a scheduled activity.
Sometimes it happens between classes, over coffee, or in a shared study area.
These informal gathering areas, sometimes called third spaces or sticky spaces, are designed to encourage what we often think of as intentional serendipity: creating places where spontaneous interaction and engagement are more likely to happen.
And improving them does not always require major construction.
A 2026 study at KU Leuven in Belgium examined the conversion of traditional seminar rooms into collaborative learning spaces through changes in furniture arrangements. Preliminary findings suggested that the redesigned spaces encouraged interactions among students and educators.
The lesson is not that every institution needs major renovation, a new building, or even a new classroom.
It is that how we design and organize existing spaces should reflect both the experience we want to create and how today’s students actually use campus.
Accessible Pathways and Connected Facilities
Students move between classrooms, housing, dining, recreation, and support services throughout the day.
Pathways, lighting, entrances, and signage can make campus life easier to navigate—or create barriers to participation.
Accessibility should be a foundational consideration, not an adjustment made after design decisions are finalized. Institutions should evaluate facilities and routes against applicable requirements, including the 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design, while considering how students of different abilities experience the campus.
Compliance is essential. But campus leaders should also ask whether spaces are accessible and inclusive, and whether students can comfortably and conveniently participate in everyday campus life.
Academic and Recreational Spaces
Libraries, academic buildings, student centers, athletic facilities, and recreation spaces do more than serve their primary functions.
They can also create opportunities for collaboration, shared experiences, and relationships beyond the classroom.
Their location is important, too. When facilities are connected and accessible, students may have more opportunities to participate in activities outside their immediate academic or social circles.
The question is not only, “What does this space need to do?”
It is also, “What do we want students doing here, where, and with whom?”
What Does Research Tell Us About Campus Spaces and Student Retention?
Recent research reinforces the importance of the physical environment in the student experience.
A 2025 review in Educational Psychology Review examined how campus public spaces can contribute to students feeling included or excluded from university life. The authors emphasized that physical environments deserve consideration in institutional strategies for belonging, particularly for students who have historically faced barriers to inclusion.
This finding confirms that a space is not automatically welcoming simply because it exists.
Research on retention adds another perspective.
A study published online in 2023 in the Journal of College Student Retention examined campus place attachment, social capital, and students’ intentions to re-enroll. The findings connected students’ attachment to their institution with factors associated with their plans to return.
These studies do not prove that a particular renovation will increase retention. The first examines belonging in campus public spaces; the second addresses institutional attachment and re-enrollment intentions rather than the effects of a specific design intervention.
But together, they reinforce an important point.
Students’ relationships with their institution are shaped by more than academics alone. The physical campus is part of that experience.
University of the Ozarks: Planning for a More Connected Campus
At the University of the Ozarks, campus planning became part of a broader effort to strengthen the student experience, improve retention, and position the institution for long-term success.
Our work with university leaders focused on creating a campus vision that connected facilities such as student housing, academic and athletic spaces, student centers, and learning support facilities with the connective tissue of outdoor spaces, pedestrian pathways, and green spaces.
Some improvements involved major investments. Others focused on removing barriers, improving lighting, creating pause points along pathways, and giving students more opportunities to stop, gather, and connect.
The work was about more than facilities. It was about how students experienced the campus and the relationships those spaces made possible.
University President Richard Dunsworth points to one simple example: placing athletic facilities near one another created more opportunities for students to interact across teams and activities. In his words, thoughtfully designed spaces helped students feel more connected, welcome, and part of a community, and “that sense of belonging has directly improved retention.”
The University of the Ozarks story also includes 36% total enrollment growth since 2013 and zero housing complaints following the opening of new residence halls. Those outcomes reflect a broader institutional transformation and should not be attributed to campus improvements alone.
But the Ozarks story shows why space belongs in the student success conversation. When campus planning is tied to connection, belonging, and institutional goals, the physical environment can become one part of a broader retention strategy.
How Can Institutions Align Campus Planning With Student Success?
Most institutions have people responsible for facilities, student affairs, academics, accessibility, and retention.
But students do not experience those departments separately.
If an academic support service is difficult to find, students experience that barrier regardless of who manages the building. If off-campus students have nowhere comfortable to spend time between classes, they experience that gap regardless of which department owns the space.
That is why campus planning should be connected to a campus-wide student success and retention strategy.
And the work should begin with understanding what students are experiencing.
5 Questions to Evaluate Campus Space Through a Student Success Lens
When we look at campus planning through a student success lens, five questions are especially useful:
- Connection: Where do students naturally build relationships?
Look at the places students spend time between classes, gather informally, study together, eat, live, and participate in campus life. Consider which students have easy access to those opportunities and which do not. - Access: Can students easily reach the people and resources that support them?
Academic support, advising, student services, dining, recreation, and other resources should be easy to find, navigate, and use. - Belonging: Do students have spaces where they feel welcome and comfortable staying?
A space can technically serve its purpose without making students want to spend time there. Comfort, visibility, accessibility, and the ability to gather all shape how students experience it. - Friction: Where does the physical environment make participation harder?
Look for barriers such as confusing wayfinding, disconnected facilities, too many thresholds or doorways that make a destination feel harder to access, limited off-campus student space, poor lighting, accessibility challenges, or long distances between services students frequently use. - Evidence: How will we know the space is improving the experience it was designed to support?
Pair facilities data with student feedback, utilization, engagement, belonging measures, and broader persistence trends.
Those questions should inform decisions about renovations, new facilities, and the use of existing spaces.
They should also bring facilities leaders, student affairs, academic leadership, accessibility specialists, institutional research, and students into the same conversation.
No single office has the complete picture, and no single solution solves the problem.
Improving the student experience requires more than one department to own the work.
How Can Colleges Measure Whether Campus Spaces Are Working?
Colleges and universities know a great deal about their facilities. They know how much space they have, what buildings cost to maintain, and which projects are in the capital plan.
The harder question is whether those spaces are creating the experiences students need.
A renovated student lounge may look better. But is it in the right location? Are students using it? Does it help them connect? Is it serving students who previously lacked a comfortable place to spend time?
Space performance assessments can help institutions look beyond basic utilization to understand how well a space is actually supporting the people and purposes it was designed for. Post-design impact evaluations can add another layer by comparing the student experience before and after changes are made.
Those evaluations are strongest when they combine physical space data with measures of the student experience, including:
- Space utilization: Who uses a space, when, and for what purposes?
- Belonging and experience surveys: Do students feel welcome, connected, and comfortable?
- Engagement data: Are students participating in activities and accessing services?
- Accessibility feedback: Where do students continue to encounter barriers?
- Persistence and retention trends: Are student outcomes changing alongside broader institutional initiatives?
The goal is not to attribute every improvement in retention to a facilities project.
It is to understand whether campus investments are addressing the experiences they were intended to improve.
That is the thinking behind a data-driven student retention strategy: use evidence to identify barriers, make meaningful changes, and evaluate whether those changes are working.
Campus leaders should be able to move from:
“Did we complete the project?”
to:
“Did we improve the student experience the project was intended to address?”
That is a fundamentally different measure of success.
The Campus Environment Is Part of the Student Success Strategy
Campus spaces cannot replace effective advising, academic support, financial resources, or meaningful relationships with faculty and staff.
But they influence how students experience those things.
They shape where students connect, how they participate, and whether they can access the resources available to them.
And students experience all of that as one institution.
The goal is not simply to create a more attractive campus. It is to create a campus environment that makes it easier for students to feel connected, supported, and able to succeed.
The University of the Ozarks story offers one example of how a long-term campus vision can support broader institutional goals.
At Carnegie, our campus planning and student success and retention work help institutions approach those decisions as connected parts of the same challenge.
If your institution is thinking differently about how campus planning can support belonging, engagement, and student success, we’d love to hear what you’re working on.
