‘Heat Maps’ Give Michigan State a New View of Campus Climate

For some students at Michigan State University, the towering football stadium in the middle of the campus represents an inclusive space — one where social barriers are broken down because everyone’s a Spartan. But for others, the stadium isn’t welcoming at all. In their eyes, college athletics culture encourages excessive alcohol use and poor behavior.

That’s one of the takeaways from a pair of campus-climate “heat maps” created earlier this year at Michigan State.

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Campus-climate surveys are becoming more common in higher education, and many colleges have done such surveys specifically on sexual violence in the past few years. Some institutions are surveying students in light of recent racial tensions on their campuses.

But a Michigan State survey went beyond the typical multiple-choice and open-ended questions as part of an effort to evaluate the campus climate more broadly. The university asked students to interact with a campus map, clicking on five campus buildings where they felt like they belonged, and then, on a separate map, clicking on five buildings where they thought they didn’t belong. In a box below each map, they could offer written explanations. The students were also asked to provide basic demographic information about themselves. Their answers were used to create heat maps indicating which places were clicked on the most.

The heat-mapping technique is simple, says Erich N. Pitcher, who worked on the project while pursuing his Ph.D. at Michigan State. Qualtrics, the survey software company, has added heat maps as an option so researchers can gather feedback on images, Mr. Pitcher says. He recently became associate director of research and communication in the office of Diversity and Cultural Engagement at Oregon State University.

Mr. Pitcher says the survey’s ability to gauge students’ comfort levels provided a new perspective. “Sometimes the campus climate doesn’t look at the things that are going well,” he says. “It tends to assume that the climate is negative.”

A few hundred students participated in the heat-map survey. While that’s not an especially high number on a campus with more than 50,000 students, the results still offer several useful insights, says Kristen A. Renn, a professor in the department of educational administration who helped lead the campus-climate evaluation efforts.

For instance, the library lights up as one of the most supportive spaces on campus. Students explained that library staff members were always helpful and that the building itself was highly responsive to their needs. If they needed a book for class, a quiet room to focus on a research paper, a group study area, or a computer with advanced graphic-design tools, they could find it there. Not only was the library affirming of students’ diverse identities, Mr. Pitcher says, but the space also supported them in their academic work.

The administration building, on the other hand, lights up on the unwelcoming map, indicating that students often clicked on it as a place where they didn’t feel like they belonged. That surprised Ms. Renn. She’s still looking at the data, but thinks at least a few students probably clicked the building to indicate their discontent with the university’s leadership or their frustration with the financial-aid office, also housed there.

The illuminations of some map locations seem more symbolic, Mr. Pitcher says. For instance, “the football stadium sort of stands in for the sports culture at Michigan State.” The stadium is a “hot” spot on both maps, indicating that students clicked on it as both a welcoming and an unwelcoming place.

Several residence halls light up as unwelcoming spaces, but students’ comments were generally about individual incidents, Mr. Pitcher says. Some cited experiences in which a peer had made an offensive remark about their identity group in a common area. “It wasn’t about the residence hall in particular,” he says. “It was about the people in the residence hall.”

On the other hand, many of the dorms with dining halls in them light up as supportive places. Kelsi Horn, president of Michigan State’s Black Student Alliance, says she feels more comfortable in the dorms than she does almost anywhere else — in large part because of the social atmosphere.

The student union was another building that stood out as an inclusive space for most students, Ms. Renn says. Many minority students explained that the Mosaic Multicultural Unity Center, located within the building, was the main reason they felt comfortable there.

There weren’t as many racial or ethnic patterns among the responses as one might expect. Some minority students were critical of the football stadium’s environment. “No diversity and I feel as if I get hostile looks for my race,” wrote a Filipina student. But others said the stadium unified the campus community. “Once things are about football, everyone comes together and it doesn’t matter where you are from,” wrote a Latina student.

“There’s no universal truth about the way that students experienced it,” Mr. Pitcher says. He says that reflects the difficulty of measuring a campus climate. What’s happening broadly across an institution is one thing, he says, but students’ individual experiences — the “microclimates,” as he describes them — are what truly shape their time at a college.

Demographic patterns might be more clear-cut at colleges where Greek life is a major part of the campus, Ms. Renn says. At Michigan State, all of the fraternity and sorority houses are off campus. She wonders: What would students say about the fraternity row at institutions known for having a strong Greek culture?

On the heat map of uncomfortable locations, students often clicked on outdoor spaces as well as buildings, noting that some such areas were dark and isolated. The walkways in West Circle, on the northern part of the campus, light up slightly on that map. Ms. Horn, of the Black Student Alliance, says she doesn’t really feel supported in that area — mostly because she doesn’t often go there, so the buildings and paths are unfamiliar to her.

Mr. Pitcher is presenting a paper at this year’s Association for the Study of Higher Education conference, in November, that he hopes will encourage more colleges to incorporate visual elements like heat maps into campus-climate assessments. Doing so, he says, will help give colleges a richer understanding of safety and inclusion.

Such visual measurements can also help translate an ambiguous term like “campus climate” into something more concrete, he says. Diversity officers “can use data to help make the case to the public as well as to internal stakeholders about why we do the kinds of work that we do in higher ed,” he says.

It’s not yet clear how Michigan State will use the heat-map data. Ms. Renn hopes to release the results to groups like the residence-halls association and student government, so they can have conversations about how to make certain campus spaces more welcoming.

Mr. Pitcher believes college officials have an “ethical responsibility” to take action in response to such assessments. “If we’re going to collect these stories,” he says, “then we should do something about the stories that we have heard.”