In 1989 Nancy Schlossberg named five conditions that determine whether a person believes they matter: attention, importance, ego-extension, dependence, and appreciation. She was describing individuals in transition. My work extends the frame. If institutions communicate mattering through their policies, their practices, and their personnel, then a policy is never a neutral administrative act. It is a statement about whose presence is expected and whose needs are expendable.
This is where history and law enter. Every policy that determines who is admitted, who is retained, and who is believed carries the residue of a legal decision made long before any student arrived on campus. Reading policy without that context is reading half the document. My consulting practice, my teaching, and my scholarship all proceed from the same conviction: institutions that understand how their rules were built are the ones capable of writing better ones.
Where the framework applies
Law, policy, and procedure
A conduct code, a leave policy, a Title IX process, an accommodation workflow. These are the documents where an institution states, in operational language, who it will extend care to and under what conditions. I read policy that way, and I write it that way. It is also what I teach: both of my current graduate courses sit here.
Supporting students
Persistence is not a motivation problem. My dissertation examined the influence of mattering on Black men’s intent to persist at a regional predominantly white institution, and it found what practitioners already suspect: students stay where institutional behavior matches institutional language. The mentoring program I co-directed at Texas A&M University-Commerce produced participants averaging eight tenths of a point higher in cumulative grade point average than their peers.
Team-building and supervision
Staff need the same five conditions students do. A division that cannot tell its own people they are noticed and needed will not deliver that experience to students, whatever the strategic plan says. This is the ground of the supervision work I coordinate for the Donald A. Gehring Institute.
Change management
Reorganizations redistribute who matters. A restructure that improves the organizational chart can dismantle the relationships that were holding students in place. Naming that risk before the chart is redrawn is most of the work.
Equity, justice, and belonging
Belonging is the outcome. Mattering is the mechanism. Framing the work that way lets it continue in a contested climate, because the argument rests on institutional effectiveness rather than on assertion. The commitment does not change. The ground it stands on is sturdier.
Dr. Kyle R. Williams is the author of the forthcoming Lessons from the Chair: Behind the Scenes of Student Affairs (Emerald Publishing, Identity and Practice in Higher Education and Student Affairs series).
Dr. Kyle R. Williams 