Conditional Belonging: What Minority Ethnic STEM Students Tell UK Universities

Updated Sep 07, 2026

Belonging can depend on the conditions students face, rather than feeling secure once they enter university. Yuan-Li Tiffany Chiu and colleagues examine this through interviews with 72 minority ethnic STEM students at two pre-1992 English universities described as elite.

The interviews formed a subset of a wider 110-student project and took place online between June and December 2020. The researchers used iterative qualitative coding to explore experiences of belonging.

Three themes connected institutional competition, academic interactions and social relationships. Accounts included pressure to prove academic worth, exclusion connected to ethnicity, and difficulty fitting social expectations. The authors interpret these experiences through conditional belonging: acceptance can feel contingent on performance, conformity or context. Read the full study and findings.

The interviews explain experiences in depth; they do not estimate the proportion of all students who encounter them. The institutional setting, period and limited scope for intersectional analysis also matter. This was not an evaluation of an inclusion programme or text-analysis tool.

Questions for student-experience teams

We suggest asking students about situations in which they feel able to participate and situations in which they hold back. That gives a team concrete experiences to investigate alongside any overall belonging score.

When reviewing feedback, consider whose experiences may be missing and how to discuss sensitive findings without identifying individuals. Ask students what response would be useful, record the action taken, and return to the issue later. These are local practice suggestions rather than outcomes established by this paper. Our student voice guide provides related context.

Evidence and review

Review note, 7 September 2026: Checked against the full paper. The sample, setting and dates were confirmed. We clarified the limits of qualitative evidence and separated reported experiences from claims about intervention effectiveness.

Reference

Chiu, Y.-L. T., Wong, B., Murray, Ó. M., Horsburgh, J. and Copsey-Blake, M. (2026; first published online 2025). ‘I deserve to be here’: minority ethnic students and their conditional belonging in UK higher education. Higher Education, 91, 1273–1290. DOI: 10.1007/s10734-025-01469-1.