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Atrium Collective

For institutions

Stronger retention, built on belonging.

We design, build and run it end to end: the technology your students use, the systems it connects to, and the measurement that shows what changed. Your team carries the outcome, not the implementation.

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The problem

Attrition starts with students who never connect

Most students who leave were not failing. They drifted because they never became part of the place, and the step they struggle with most is simply getting involved. That struggle is measurable, and it shows up long before anyone formally withdraws.

22.9% of first-year students are not enrolled at any college a year later.
50% of first-year students report success getting involved in campus activities, the lowest of 18 transition areas.
32% of currently enrolled undergraduates considered stopping out in the past six months, with emotional stress the most cited reason.
First-year transition: students reporting some or very much success
Becoming involved in campus activities lowest of 18 50% Making friends 3rd lowest (tied) 68% Feeling like I belong at this university 8th highest of 18 80%
Students rate their success across 18 areas of the first-year transition. Getting involved ranks last.

The cost

What attrition costs

The students least likely to stay are the most expensive to lose. International undergraduates pay several times domestic tuition and continue at lower rates, while tuition and fees now fund close to half of Canadian university operating budgets.

$41,746 average international undergraduate tuition in Canada, against $7,734 for domestic students.
82.9% of international undergraduates continue past first year, against 87.6% of domestic students.
47.4% of Canadian university operating revenue comes from tuition and fees.

Figures are gross tuition and do not net out costs an institution avoids when a student leaves.

The gap

Nothing you run today is responsible for belonging

Your learning platform delivers coursework and your student system keeps records. Neither is measured on whether a student feels part of the university. So belonging lives in an annual survey, retention lives in enrolment data, and nobody joins the two while there is still time to reach the student.

Belonging surveyed once a year
not linked
Retention counted after they leave

Our measurement service is the layer between them. It reads connection through the year, in aggregate, and puts it beside the retention outcome.

The technology

It fits the systems you already run

We are not asking you to replace anything or to stand up a platform your staff has to learn. Students sign in with their university credentials. Event and club data moves both ways with the systems your student life office already maintains. What comes back to you is a dashboard, not a data project.

Setup is measured in weeks, and the work sits with us rather than with your IT team.

  • Single sign-on through your existing identity provider, so students create no new account.
  • Two-way sync with campus calendars and event systems, so nothing is entered twice.
  • Aggregate dashboards with no individual-level tracking.
  • Accessibility and English and French parity built in from the start.
  • Hosted, maintained, and updated by us.

Why now

Belonging is becoming a measured priority

Wellness covers more than academics. Students who feel connected are better protected, and belonging shows up in their mental health as much as in whether they re-enrol.

Attention to this has grown quickly in both research and policy. Universities that get ahead of it now are not scrambling to answer for it later.

Higher-education research on sense of belonging
0 100 200 300 77 308 2016 2019 2022 2025
Peer-reviewed higher-education studies on sense of belonging. Four times as many in 2025 as in 2016.

What we do

Three services

Personalized technology solutions

Utilizing the frontier of technology to build and measure student belonging, and to turn campus engagement into actionable insights.

Implementation and integration

We deploy the whole system alongside the platforms you already run, end to end. Implementation remains our responsibility, not your staff's.

Advisory and research

Focus groups and engagement audits that show where students are falling through and what to change.

How we handle data

Aggregate only

We report patterns, never people. Data is anonymized and collected with consent, which keeps this well clear of anything resembling surveillance of individual students.

Accessible and bilingual

We build to WCAG 2.1 AA, which meets or exceeds the standard required across Canadian jurisdictions, and deliver full English and French parity. The tool supports your accessibility and language obligations rather than adding to them.

Honest reporting

We report what the data shows, including when it is inconvenient. No vanity metrics, and no figures we cannot stand behind.

Request a conversation

No commitment. We will bring the problem in your numbers, show you the product running, and explain how a first engagement would work. We would rather earn this over a few meetings than push for a decision in one.

Built by two final-year students who ran into this problem on their own campus.