Illustration by Justin Morrison / Inside Higher Ed
Driving around in St. Louis a few years ago, I saw a bunch of white yard signs that simply said, “You Matter.” As a person who loves a mental health–themed T-shirt, door mat or pillow, I immediately looked up the signs to learn more. They were part of the Don’t Give Up movement for suicide prevention and awareness, and they really made me pause and think, “Why did a stranger saying ‘You Matter’ to another stranger make even this psychiatrist feel hopeful and thankful?”
I think it had to do with the sign’s verb choice, though I didn’t fully realize it at the time.
More recently, I began seeing LinkedIn post after LinkedIn post about a New York Times bestselling book by Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose (Penguin Random House). People I admire in higher education were singing its praises and emphasizing how central this word deserves to be in our vernacular. I should have known. I see it every day with diagnoses, or even just calling a feeling “rage” instead of “irritable.” Labels are healing and eye-opening. But I’d never considered mattering in quite the same way.
I knew I needed to learn more and spoke to Breheny Wallace about the word, especially in higher education; how to think about it with employees and students; and what we can do on campus to show people they matter. Breheny Wallace is also the founder of The Mattering Institute, which translates the science of mattering into practical strategies for building cultures where people thrive. This fall, she is launching the Mattering Campus Initiative to bring the science and practice of mattering to universities and K–12 schools.
Q: Your book centers on a deceptively simple idea: that people need to feel that they matter. What does it actually mean to matter, and how is that different from belonging?
A: Mattering, studied since the 1980s, is defined by researchers as feeling valued for who you are by your family, your friends, your colleagues and your community and having an opportunity to add value back across those domains.
Mattering is the story we tell ourselves about our place in the world: Do people notice me—or am I invisible on this campus? Do I make a difference? When we can answer yes to those questions, we show up in positive ways. We want to connect, contribute and engage.
Mattering is a meta need, or an umbrella term, meaning it sits above other needs, like belonging, connection, mastery, agency and self-determination. But mattering goes deeper. For example, you can belong to a club, a dorm or a class—and not feel like you matter to the people there. While belonging gives you a seat at the table, mattering tells you that your input is valued and would be missed if you weren’t there.
We are right to want to build campuses where students and faculty feel like they belong. But in today’s current climate, belonging doesn’t go far enough.
Q: What happens when students begin to confuse achievement with mattering—or feel that their value to an institution depends on what they produce?
A: In my research, I’ve asked thousands of students one direct question: Do you feel like you matter? For far too many, the honest answer is “no,” or “only sometimes.” They feel like they matter when their GPA is high, when they land the prestigious internship, when their follower count climbs and when they get into the right fraternity or sorority.
Achievement is not the problem. The problem is when our sense of worth is so tangled up with our achievements that we only feel good about ourselves when we are achieving. And when we are not, when we have setbacks or experience failures, we can struggle intensely. A healthy institution can hold high standards while making clear that a person’s worth is not up for negotiation with every outcome.
Q: How does an employee’s own experience of mattering affect their ability to make students feel seen? Are there small acts that do not require faculty and staff to become everything to everyone?
A: An educator’s own sense of mattering shapes the emotional bandwidth they have for students. When faculty and staff feel invisible, depleted or interchangeable, it is much harder to offer students the attention that helps them feel seen and valued. Mattering is relational: Adults who feel valued are better able to communicate value to others.
I’ve put the core ingredients into a framework I call the SAID framework: people need to feel significant, appreciated, invested in and depended on. It points to small, concrete signals colleges can build into everyday work.
Here’s how I think about that in practice, starting with S, significant. A department chair notices that a professor seems unusually withdrawn and checks in privately: “You haven’t seemed like yourself lately. How are you doing?” Then, A, appreciated. Rather than offering a generic thank-you, a leader names the impact: “The way you supported that student through a difficult semester is one reason she is still here.”
Next is I, invested in. A dean protects time, provides mentorship or funds professional development connected to an educator’s goals. And finally, D, depended on. Before making a decision that affects teaching or student life, a leader asks a faculty or staff member for their judgment and then explains how that perspective shaped the outcome
When educators receive those messages themselves following this easy framework, they are far more able to pass them on to students.
The same framework can be built into the student experience. At the University of Michigan, one practical approach in mattering work is encouraging professor check-ins in large classes. The intervention takes less than a minute, but it tells the student, “You are not anonymous here.”
Colleges can create more of these signals without placing an unrealistic burden on professors, like inviting students to complete an early-semester card answering, “What should I know about you to help you succeed here?”
These are small acts, but they answer the questions running in the backs of students’ minds: Does anyone know me here? Does my voice count? Is this place better because I am part of it?
Q: What everyday behaviors communicate “you matter”? How can supervisors avoid communicating, “You matter because of how much you do for us”?
A: When I interview employees, I always ask them, “Tell me about a time when you felt like you mattered.” Rarely do people mention big moments at work, like a promotion or an award. They always talk about the smaller moments: a colleague checking in after a particularly rough week at work or a manager texting to check in about their mother’s surgery. We crave to matter in the everydayness of life—to matter in the mundane.
Supervisors can communicate mattering through small, repeatable behaviors: Ask for someone’s perspective before making a decision, credit an idea, explain the specific impact of their work, notice their growth, protect their time, follow up on something they shared, and invest in their development.
Q: How can someone believe deeply that their work matters while increasingly feeling that they don’t?
A: Workplaces have the potential to be one of the greatest engines of mattering. And yet, so often, they do the opposite.
What I’ve learned in my research is that most people don’t disengage because they’re lazy. They disengage when they stop believing that they—or their efforts—matter. Pulling back becomes a form of self-protection, a coping strategy. Think of it this way—it hurts less to withdraw your effort than to keep giving your energy to a place that makes you feel invisible.
But I’ve also seen workplaces that lean into building cultures of mattering—educators, tech entrepreneurs, finance executives and more. Different industries, different kinds of pressure. But these organizations had arrived at the same fundamental truth: When employees know they are valued, they work harder, stay loyal and bring more energy to their work.
Feeling valued is the strongest driver of employee engagement—and engagement is one of the best predictors of productivity and innovation. In other words, creating a culture of mattering isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s smart business.
Q: What is the one thing you would tell a department chair, chancellor or university president to do?
A: Every campus has extraordinary people creating pockets of mattering through instinct and generosity. But whether a student or employee feels seen should not depend on the luck of getting the right professor, adviser, chair or supervisor. We don’t have to leave mattering to chance. We can design it into the student and employee experiences.
