Student belonging is a burgeoning topic in education research because of its positive association with persistence and graduation. It is thought to underscore why students minoritized on a campus, either by race or social class, have higher rates of departure and lower levels of well-being than students who make up the majority (Gillen-O'Neel 2021; Gopalan and Brady 2020; Nunn 2021; Strayhorn 2018). This dissertation is a case study of student belonging. Specifically, I analyze longitudinal surveys and interviews with a sample of first-generation college students who were surveyed and interviewed four times across their four undergraduate years. My findings support the association between marginalization, belonging, and persistence, while also encouraging researchers to reconsider the causal relationship between belonging and positive academic outcomes. Chapter 2 identifies four classes of student belonging based on two waves of survey responses (n=911, n=486). Using Repeated Measure Latent Class Analysis, I find belonging patterns along academic and social axes. Students often change classifications across years, and generally first-year students who feel they belong socially are more likely to maintain or develop academic belonging than students who lack social belonging during their first year. The class-type grouping revealed by the data are clearly connected to race and, to a lesser extent, social class background. White students tend to have higher levels of social belonging than non-White students, and by the second year of college students whose families help finance their education are more likely to relate deeper social belonging than students without familial support. Though belonging is associated with a student's intention to persist, I find no significant association with grades. Chapter 3 explores trajectories of student belonging, and whether and how such belonging shifts, through an analysis of 56 semi-structured longitudinal interviews. In this regard, I find that a student's sense of belonging influences their choice of major. Students with a pattern of heightened academic and social belonging tend to persist in their major, students who lack one form of belonging or the other are more likely to switch majors within a given field, and students who lack both forms of belonging tend to exit their original field for a more academically distant major compared to where they started. This suggests that the positive relationship between belonging and academic outcomes could suffer from endogeneity: as opposed to belonging increasing the likelihood of academic achievement, it instead seems to be the case that high levels of belonging imply that students have found a major that accommodates them academically and socially. In Chapter 4, I leverage the multiple measures of student belonging to evaluate the results of the latent variable analyses. Though about half of the cases converge, my investigation of the divergent cases supports the validity of Latent Class Analyses (i.e., divergence is due to increases and decreases in belonging between data collection periods). Belonging increases when students develop a network of peers or change majors. Belonging decreases when students' context-of-arrival contrasts with what they later perceive as the 'true' campus. This is the case for early-arrival program participants, as well as first-year students whose interactions with faculty and staff are limited to first- semester advising appointments. Finally, I conclude in Chapter 5 by reviewing my findings and consider the implications of making students responsible for developing a sense of belonging by, for example, choosing a major based on its perceived fit. Such policies exacerbate educational inequalities by allowing programs that withhold belonging from some students, and are often the most highly sought majors, to cement their unwelcoming conditions. I end this chapter by connecting the internal segmentation of universities to Effectively Maintained Inequality (Gerber and Cheung 2008; Lucas 2001). This perspective suggests that once a level of education becomes "saturated," meaning the credential becomes attainable to a wider population, qualitative distinctions within credentials maintain unequal outcomes. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]