What does a university look like when its community members are truly flourishing — and what is the cost when they are not?
I recently attended a workshop that has been on my mind for the past few days. Facilitated by Laurie Schreiner, the scholar behind the Thriving Quotient, the session asked a deceptively simple question: What does it actually look like when people thrive? Not survive, not comply, not simply persist, but genuinely thrive? Although Schreiner's research has focused primarily on college students, she was clear that the principles apply with equal force to the faculty and staff who make up any institution's workforce. I left the workshop convinced that she is right and that most of us have spent too little time imagining what our organizations would look like if everyone in them were truly flourishing.
The Five Dimensions of the Thriving Quotient
Schreiner's Thriving Quotient measures five dimensions of thriving: Engaged Learning: meaningful processing of new ideas, focused attention, and genuine intellectual energizing; Academic Determination: goal-directedness, effort investment, self-regulation, and the belief that one can reach important goals; Diverse Citizenship: openness to difference, desire to contribute to the broader community, a growth mindset, and genuine investment in the well-being of others; Social Connectedness: healthy relationships, friendships, a felt sense of community, and the confidence that comes from knowing you are not alone; and Positive Perspective: optimism grounded in reality, not naïve cheerfulness, but a proactive orientation toward challenges that sustains effort over time.
A Portrait of a Thriving Community
Picture a university where these five dimensions are not aspirational bullet points on a strategic plan, but lived realities. Faculty come to class, committee meetings, and department conversations energized by the ideas they are grappling with together. Staff engage with their work not because they are monitored, but because they feel invested in outcomes that matter. People pursue ambitious goals because they believe they are reachable and feel supported in reaching them. Across lines of difference, including discipline, rank, generation, and identity, community members approach one another with curiosity rather than defensiveness. They feel connected, seen, and valued. And when setbacks come, as they always do, they approach those setbacks with the kind of clear-eyed optimism that sustains persistence.
That is not a fantasy. It is what Schreiner's research identifies as thriving, describing thriving individuals as "not only succeeding academically but also engaged in the learning process, investing effort to reach important educational goals, managing time and commitments effectively, connected in healthy ways to other people, optimistic about the future, positive about present choices, appreciative of differences in others, and committed to enriching their community” (Schreiner, 2020). Every word of that description, written about students, applies just as fully to the colleagues sitting across from us in a faculty senate meeting or behind a service desk. When a community is thriving, the energy is not just individual; it is relational. It circulates. It compounds.
The Problem of Belonging and What Happens Without It
Underlying every dimension of thriving is something more fundamental: a sense of belonging. Terrell Strayhorn, whose work on this subject has shaped a generation of higher education practice, argues that belonging is not a luxury or a nicety; it is "a basic human need and motivation, sufficient to influence behavior" (Strayhorn, 2018, p. 4). Belonging, he writes, is the sense that one is valued, included, and an important member of a community. It is correlated with academic achievement, persistence, and overall well-being. Its absence, predictably, produces the opposite.
Strayhorn makes clear that belonging with peers in the classroom or on campus is a critical dimension of success at college, one that can affect a student's academic adjustment, achievement, and aspirations, and even whether a student stays in school. The same is true for employees.
What does non-belonging look like in practice? It looks like the new faculty member who attends every departmental gathering but is never quite pulled into the real conversations, the ones that happen in doorways and parking lots, among the people who have been here for decades. It looks like the staff member who brings a genuinely good idea to a meeting, only to have it met with silence or mild redirection, and learns over time that the safest move is to stop bringing ideas. It looks like the student worker who wonders whether anyone would notice if they simply stopped showing up.
When people do not feel they belong, something quieter than departure happens first. They disengage. They protect themselves. They stop investing discretionary effort, the effort that goes beyond the minimum, that drives innovation, creativity, and genuine institutional health. Strayhorn's research is unambiguous: perceived marginality undermines not just morale, but outcomes. And institutions that depend on the excellence of their people, which is to say, all institutions, cannot afford this loss. I’ve referenced this in a previous post on why employees leave.
The Cost to Institutional Integrity
There is a word that does not come up often enough in conversations about inclusion and belonging: integrity. Not in the ethical sense alone, but in the structural sense: wholeness, coherence, integration. An institution lacks integrity when its stated values diverge from its lived realities. When a university proclaims that every member of its community matters, but then structures its systems, meetings, hiring practices, and recognition patterns in ways that routinely leave certain people out, the gap between rhetoric and reality erodes trust. It erodes trust not just among those who are excluded, but among those who observe the exclusion and draw their own conclusions about what the institution actually values.
Schreiner's research includes institutional integrity as a pathway to thriving, the sense that an institution does what it says it will do, that its systems are fair, and that community members can trust the environment around them. When that trust is absent, thriving becomes difficult to sustain regardless of individual effort or resilience. The load of navigating a community that does not fully include you is not invisible; it is real psychological work that consumes energy and attention that might otherwise go toward learning, creating, and contributing.
Leaders must reckon with this honestly. The failure to create genuinely inclusive environments is not merely an HR issue or a diversity metric to be managed. It is a question of whether the institution is actually becoming what it claims to be. You cannot have institutional excellence while excluding people from the conditions that make excellence possible.
What Happens When People Are Not Invited to Engage?
Engagement does not happen by accident, and its absence is rarely the fault of the people who are disengaged. When community members are not explicitly invited to participate in shared governance, visioning processes, informal social life, or the institution's intellectual project, they tend to conclude that their participation was never really wanted. This conclusion is rational. It is also damaging.
Schreiner's dimension of Engaged Learning reminds us that thriving requires active intellectual participation, the sense that one is meaningfully processing what is happening and carrying those ideas forward. For students, this means more than attendance; for employees, it means more than compliance. Engaged professionals believe that their perspectives inform decisions, that their expertise is respected, and that they are genuine partners in the institution's mission. When that belief is not supported by experience, people become spectators in the communities they were supposed to build.
The fix here is not a suggestion box or an annual survey that gets filed away. It is structural. It is a culture in which questions are genuinely asked - and genuinely heard. In which the people who do the work have real influence over how it is organized. In which leadership makes visible how input has shaped outcomes. Invitation to engage must be more than symbolic; it must be accompanied by evidence that engagement matters.
Creating Welcoming Environments: What Must Be Done
Welcoming environments are built, not wished into existence. They require deliberate attention across every system an institution operates, from onboarding to physical space, from how meetings are run to how recognition is distributed, from what gets celebrated in newsletters to who is pictured in the photographs on the wall.
Strayhorn's research reminds us that belonging is context-specific: the conditions that foster it for one group may not work for another, and institutions must be willing to attend carefully to the particular needs of students and employees who have historically been marginalized in higher education. A growth mindset, one of the attributes Schreiner associates with Diverse Citizenship, is required of institutions, not just of individuals. The question is not whether we have ever gotten this wrong; it is whether we are willing to examine how we got it wrong and keep working to get it right.
Some of the most important infrastructure for belonging is relational. Mentoring relationships, peer networks, intentional community-building across departments, and regular practices of genuine recognition are the connective tissue of thriving communities. They do not require large budgets. They require sustained attention and the willingness of leaders at every level to prioritize them even when the calendar is full and the spreadsheets are demanding.
Support Systems That Enable Thriving
Thriving does not emerge from good intentions alone. It requires structural support. For students, that has historically meant academic advising, financial aid, mental health services, and peer mentoring. For faculty and staff, the parallel structures are less developed at most institutions, but no less necessary.
Professional development that is genuinely responsive to what people need, not just what administrators think they need, signals investment in growth. Supervisory relationships built on trust, clarity, and genuine accountability create the conditions in which people take productive risks. Employee assistance programs, mental health resources, and cultures that do not stigmatize seeking help address the reality that thriving is not a constant state but something that requires tending, especially in periods of institutional stress.
Belonging itself is a support system. When Strayhorn writes about the role of peer relationships in fostering a sense of belonging, he is describing something that institutions can cultivate through design: mentoring circles, affinity groups, communities of practice, and welcome rituals that are genuine rather than perfunctory. These structures say, in effect: you are not alone here, and we are not indifferent to your flourishing.
Realistic Optimism: The Disposition That Sustains Thriving
Of all the dimensions Schreiner identifies, the one that strikes me as most important, and perhaps most misunderstood, is Positive Perspective. She is careful to distinguish this from naïve optimism or forced cheerfulness. A positive perspective, in her framework, is what psychologists call realistic optimism: the capacity to hold a clear-eyed view of difficulties while maintaining confidence that things can improve and that one's own effort contributes to that improvement.
This distinction matters enormously in higher education right now. Institutions are navigating genuine challenges, including budget pressures, enrollment uncertainty, political pressures, and technological disruption. A culture of toxic positivity, one that papers over real difficulties, suppresses legitimate concern, and punishes honest conversation, is not a culture of thriving. It is a culture of performance, and it exhausts people.
Realistic optimism, by contrast, names difficulties clearly and then turns its energy toward response. It does not pretend that things are fine; it makes the case that things can be improved, and it equips people with the tools and relationships they need to participate in that work. Leaders who model realistic optimism, who say, honestly, "this is hard, and here is what I believe we can do together," create the conditions in which thriving can take root even in difficult seasons.
When Thriving Feels Temporary: Making It Last
Here is a thing that happens that we do not talk about enough: people who have fought hard to belong, who have finally found their footing, who have arrived at something that feels like thriving, often fear it will not last. Sometimes this fear is realistic; they have experienced reversals before. Sometimes it is the residue of earlier exclusion. But the fragility of thriving, especially for people who have not always felt welcome, is real and deserves institutional acknowledgment.
Schreiner's research suggests that thriving is not a fixed state but a set of malleable qualities that can be cultivated and sustained. This is hopeful precisely because it means thriving is not just something some people are lucky enough to experience. It is something institutions can actively support over time. The conditions that enabled someone to thrive in their first year should not be withdrawn in their third, and thriving should not be treated as an individual achievement that people are left to maintain on their own.
Sustainment requires community. When people are in relationships with others who see them, challenge them, and care about their growth, when they feel accountable to a community they also belong to, the experience of thriving becomes less vulnerable to the ordinary fluctuations of institutional life. Mentors who check in after the formal onboarding period ends, colleagues who notice when someone seems to have retreated, supervisors who conduct genuine development conversations rather than annual compliance exercises, these are the people who help others hold onto what they have worked to build.
There is also something to be said for helping people understand what thriving actually is; naming it, so they can recognize it in themselves and tend to it intentionally. Schreiner's work gives us that language. When someone knows that the energized feeling they have when they are fully engaged in a problem is not an accident but a sign of something worth protecting, when they understand that their optimism and their connectedness are resources they can invest in and draw from, they are better equipped to sustain those qualities through difficult stretches.
The vision Schreiner offers is not utopian. It is grounded in decades of research and in the recognizable reality of communities where people show up fully, contribute generously, and feel that their presence genuinely matters. What keeps that vision from being realized in most institutions is not lack of aspiration. It is a lack of sustained, structural commitment to the conditions that make thriving possible for everyone, not just those for whom belonging has always come easily.
That commitment is a leadership responsibility. It requires honesty about who is currently left out and why. It requires a willingness to build systems that actively include rather than passively invite. And it requires the realistic optimism to believe - and to help others believe - that the work of building such a community is both possible and worth doing.
We get to decide what kind of community we are. That decision is made not in mission statements but in a thousand daily choices about how we structure our meetings, design our spaces, conduct our searches, recognize our colleagues, and respond when someone tells us they do not feel they belong. When we get those choices right, something remarkable happens. People thrive. And when people thrive, institutions become genuinely worthy of the mission they claim to serve.
Further Reading
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
Fredrickson, B. L. (2009). Positivity: Top-notch research reveals the 3-to-1 ratio that will change your life. Harmony.
Keyes, C. L. M., & Haidt, J. (Eds.). (2002). Flourishing: Positive psychology and the life well-lived. American Psychological Association.
Schreiner, L. A. (2010). The "Thriving Quotient": A new vision for student success. About Campus, 15(2), 2–10. https://doi.org/10.1002/abc.20016
Schreiner, L. A. (2010). Thriving in community. About Campus, 15(4), 2–11. https://doi.org/10.1002/abc.20029
Schreiner, L. A., Louis, M., & Nelson, D. D. (Eds.). (2020). Thriving in transitions: A research-based approach to college student success. 2nd ed. National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition.
Strayhorn, T. L. (2018). College students' sense of belonging: A key to educational success for all students (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315297293
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