A student steps off a plane, unfolds a new SIM card, and finds a room that will hold her life for the next few years. Within days she has a student ID, a class schedule, a library card. What she does not have, and what no orientation packet can hand her is the feeling of being somewhere that knows her. That gap between having a place and belonging to it is the real subject of this piece, and international students may be the population who understand it most intimately. In the 2024/25 academic year, U.S. institutions alone hosted nearly 1.2 million international students, a five percent increase from the year before, while Canada welcomed 840,000 and the U.S. sector as a whole drew learners from more than 200 countries of origin (IIE, 2025). Millions of people are, at any given moment, trying to build a life inside a culture that was not designed with them in mind. Belonging, for this group, is not a soft campus buzzword. It is a daily, practical, psychological task and a 2025 review of 118 studies found it to be reliably linked to student engagement, wellbeing, and retention, making it one of the strongest predictors of whether a student stays, thrives, or quietly withdraws (Gilani and Thomas, 2025).
Belonging Is Not the Same as Fitting In Psychology has treated belonging as a biological need since Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary's influential paper on what they called the "need to belong": the idea that forming and maintaining a minimum quantity of lasting, positive relationships is not a preference but a fundamental human motivation, on par with hunger or safety (Baumeister and Leary, 1995). When that need goes unmet, the consequences show up not only emotionally but physically in sleep, immune function, and cognitive performance. But belonging in an unfamiliar country complicates the picture, because it is often confused with something narrower: fitting in. Higher education scholar Christina Yao has argued that pushing international students toward integration adopting host-culture norms as the price of admission can actually work against belonging rather than support it, since it asks students to trade part of their identity for acceptance (Yao, 2015). Terrell Strayhorn's widely used framework treats belonging instead as a felt sense of mattering and being valued within a community, one that is context-dependent and has to be renewed continually, not earned once and banked (Strayhorn, 2012). A student can speak fluent English, ace every exam, and still feel like a guest in someone else's house. Belonging, in other words, is not assimilation with better manners it is being able to show up as yourself and still be counted in. Higher education researcher Chris Glass pushed this further, describing belonging along three overlapping dimensions: locality (feeling grounded in a physical place), relationships (being known by specific people), and power (having a genuine say in how a community is shaped) (Glass, 2018). Miss any one of the three, and the feeling of belonging stays partial, no matter how welcoming the campus brochure looks.
The Cost of Getting There Alone None of this happens in a vacuum. Moving abroad activates what researchers call acculturative stress a specific, measurable strain that comes from navigating a new language, new social rules, and often outright discrimination, on top of the ordinary pressures of student life (Sandhu and Asrabadi, 1994). A 2025 longitudinal study following Chinese international students in Australia over five months found that their acculturative stress actually increased over time rather than fading, even as their general distress levels stayed comparable to peers who never left China (Xiong et al., 2025). That detail matters: it suggests that early orientation programs, however well-intentioned, may be solving the wrong problem. Adjustment is not a hurdle cleared in week one, for many students it is a slow accumulation. Loneliness compounds this. One of the earliest large-scale studies on the subject, conducted in Australia, found that international students reported markedly higher loneliness than domestic peers, driven less by distance from home than by the difficulty of forming real friendships with local students (Sawir et al., 2008). Nearly two decades later, the pattern still holds. A multi-year survey across German universities found that, regardless of when it was measured, international students consistently reported more depressive symptoms, higher perceived stress, and lower perceived social support than their domestic classmates (Prado et al., 2024). And because loneliness and depressive symptoms tend to move together, with loneliness often preceding and predicting later distress, an unmet need to belong rarely stays psychologically contained, it tends to spread (Xiong et al., 2025). John Berry's classic model of acculturation offers a useful map for what is happening underneath these numbers. He described four possible strategies people use when encountering a new culture: integration (keeping one's own culture while engaging with the new one), assimilation (abandoning the old for the new), separation (holding onto the old and avoiding the new), and marginalization (losing connection to both) (Berry, 1997). Of the four, only integration reliably predicts good long-term wellbeing and it is also, not coincidentally, the hardest to pull off alone. It requires a receiving community willing to make room, not just a student willing to adapt.
Belonging Starts Before the Suitcase Is Packed One of the more counterintuitive recent findings is that belonging doesn't begin at orientation it begins, or fails to begin, months before a student ever boards a flight. A 2024 survey of more than 1,600 prospective international students found that 80 percent were already looking for a sense of belonging before they had even applied, and three-quarters said they felt they belonged at their preferred institution before their first day on campus (Ambassador Platform / ICEF Monitor, 2024). That finding reframes belonging as something institutions can either build or squander early through the tone of an email, the presence of a peer contact, the sense that someone on the other end is actually paying attention long before a student is jet-lagged and searching for the nearest grocery store. What seems to matter most once students do arrive is not grand institutional gestures but ordinary, repeated contact. A 2025 framework built from interviews with international graduate students identified four practical levers that shaped whether students felt they belonged: proactive advising, peer mentorship, culturally responsive training for staff, and integrated support that treats a student's academic, social, and immigration needs as connected rather than separate departments (Mai et al., 2025). Related classroom research found that even a single semester-long structured activity designed to pair international and domestic students led to measurable increases in belonging and perceived support by the end of the term evidence that belonging can be designed for, not just hoped for (Caligiuri et al., 2020).
Holding Two Homes at Once Perhaps the most important reframe in this research is that belonging for a person living between cultures was never going to look like belonging for someone who has stayed in one place their whole life. Some international students describe a shifting, layered sense of identity attached simultaneously to a hometown, a new city, an academic discipline, a global community of people who have made the same leap they have (Glass, 2018). That multiplicity is not a deficient, watered-down version of belonging. It may be closer to what belonging actually requires of anyone in a mobile, interconnected world: not a single fixed address for the self, but several rooms a person can return to, each one recognizing them a little differently. The most honest answer to "what does it mean to belong somewhere," then, may be this: belonging is not a place you arrive at once and keep. It is a relationship a person has to keep renewing with the people and spaces around them and for those who have crossed a border to get there, that relationship has to be built, deliberately and repeatedly, rather than simply assumed.
Kaynakça
- Ambassador Platform / ICEF Monitor. (2024). Study shows that international students want a sense of belonging long before arriving on campus. ICEF Monitor.
- Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.
- Berry, J. W. (1997). Immigration, acculturation, and adaptation. Applied Psychology, 46(1), 5–34.
- Caligiuri, P., DuBois, C. L. Z., Lundby, K., and Sinclair, E. A. (2020). Fostering international students' sense of belonging and perceived social support through a semester-long experiential activity. Research in Comparative and International Education, 15(4), 357–370.
- Gilani, D., & Thomas, L. (2025). Understanding the factors and consequences of student belonging in higher education: a critical literature review. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, (34). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi34.1385
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- Institute of International Education (IIE). (2025). Open Doors 2025: International student enrollment data.
- Mai, N. T., Cao, W., & Wang, Y. (2025). The global belonging support framework: Enhancing equity and access for international graduate students. Journal of International Students, 15(9), 141-160. https://doi.org/10.32674/badf4n40
- Prado, A. D. S., Baldofski, S., Kohls, E., & Rummel-Kluge, C. (2024). International and domestic university students' mental health over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany: Comparison between 2020, 2021, and 2022. PloS one, 19(2), e0299812. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299812.
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- Strayhorn, T. L. (2012). College Students' Sense of Belonging: A Key to Educational Success for All Students. Routledge.
- Xiong, W., Quinney, B., King, D. L., Ali, K., Radunz, M., Zhao, Y., Kyrios, M., & Fassnacht, D. B. (2025). The acculturation challenge: A longitudinal investigation of acculturative stress and mental health of Chinese international students in Australia. Journal of affective disorders, 374, 477–485. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2025.01.082
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