Why do minority students feel they don’t fit in? Migration background and parental education differentially predict social ostracism and belongingness

Minority students’ belongingness on campus has become an emergent topic in psychological research. Past research has particularly focused on belonging uncertainty as a potential explanation for impaired belongingness in minority students. While this represents an important perspective, we argue that students of certain minority groups may also be more likely to be confronted with actual ostracism experiences on campus. Using structural equation modelling, we investigated associations between minority status, ostracism, and belongingness in an aggregated sample derived from two longitudinal survey studies ( n = 973 students) with two time points (beginning of the first and of the second semester) at a German university. We show that student characteristics that are likely more visible (migration background with family ties to the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, or Latin America) are linked to impaired belongingness both directly as well as indirectly through experiences of ostracism. In contrast, student characteristics that are less visible (such as parental education level) are directly associated with impaired belongingness but not with experiences of ostracism. Furthermore, we found that a migration background from the aforementioned regions indirectly predicted students’ well-being, dropout intentions, and actual dropout via the experience of ostracism and subsequent impaired belongingness. For parental education level, we only found indirect effects on students’ well-being via impaired belongingness. Our findings suggest that in addition to the existing focus on belonging uncertainty, there is a need to focus psychological research and educational practice on ostracism experiences that ethnic minority students face at university.