Despite their increasing enrollment, underrepresented (UR) students still
graduate from university at lower rates than do non-underrepresented
students. One proposed explanation for this difference is a sense of
mismatch that UR students feel in the situational context of attending a
university (Walton & Cohen, 2011). Schmader and Sedikides (2018) proposed
that people experience psychological fit in an environment along three
dimensions: self-concept fit, goal fit, and social fit. Adapting this model
to the college environment, a new instrument was developed to assess the
degree to which UR students experience self-concept, goal, and social fit
in a university environment (the Student Fit in a College Environment
instrument; S’FICE; Munasinghe & Mackie, 2020). The instrument was
administered to females in STEM majors, Black students, first generation
students, and Latinx students via an online data collection service and
instrument response data were collected. We found that data generated by UR
students on the S’FICE instrument fit better with a two-factor model than
the three-factor model proposed by SAFE.