The crisis in higher education is not just financial—it’s emotional, social, and deeply personal. Today, more than ever, students are showing up on campus anxious, disconnected, and uncertain about their place in the world. According to The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being in Higher Education by Tay and McCuskey, nearly 44% of students report symptoms of depression, 37% report anxiety, and 15% have seriously considered suicide in the past year. These are not just numbers—they’re signals that the traditional models of student engagement are failing.
David Porter, president of Porter Khouw Consulting (PKC), believes colleges and universities have an opportunity and an obligation to act. Fortunately, a powerful tool is already present on every campus: the dining program. When reimagined through David’s SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ framework and implemented as a Next Generation Dining Program, campus dining becomes more than a place to eat. It becomes a platform for belonging, resilience, empathy, academic success, and emotional security and well-being.
Let me show you how.
The Case for a Holistic Approach
Tay and McCuskey define well-being as “achieving positive, optimal functioning across all levels of analysis, populations, and contexts.” In other words, student success is not only academic—it’s emotional, social, physical, and psychological. It exists at multiple layers: individual, relational, institutional, and societal. The handbook urges institutions to build ecosystems of support that integrate both research and practice in ways that are culturally responsive and equitable.
What the handbook doesn’t explicitly say—but what David Porter has been demonstrating for over three decades—is that dining is the only recurring, non-classroom-based touchpoint that reaches virtually every student every day. That makes it the perfect lever for building what the Oxford authors call a “culture of care and connection.”
SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™: From Meal to Meaning
SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ is our proprietary framework for transforming dining into a catalyst for enriching levels of student engagement, purposeful connections and accidental collisions, transforming campus culture “The College Experience”. It’s built on a simple but powerful insight: the programmed and built environment and human behavior are deeply intertwined. When you create and invest in the student value proposition by organizing space, hours of operation, menu variety and selection, and meal plans intentionally, you can promote the face-to-face human interactions students are craving—and missing and results in students increasing the frequency that they come and go from the dining halls every day. Thus making the campus more “Sticky.”
Every element of a PKC Next Generation Dining Program is designed to spark human connection and conversation, build friendships, and support identity formation. From strategically designed communal seating and customizable food stations to student programming that celebrates cultural diversity and peer-to-peer mentorship, every detail is curated to encourage social capital building.
Why is that important? Because research from the Oxford Handbook shows that well-being is relational. Students who report strong friendship networks, a sense of belonging, and opportunities for emotional expression are more likely to persist through challenges, maintain higher GPAs, and graduate.
The First 45 Days: The Critical Window for Social Integration
SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ shines during what we call the “First 45 Days” of the academic year. This is a crucial period when students are forming their identities, routines, and relationships. If they haven’t made at least one friend and one place of belonging by the end of that window, the likelihood they’ll return for sophomore year plummets.
In a well-run Next Gen dining program, this window becomes a launchpad. We help our campus clients program daily and weekly events in their dining halls that bring people together: small-group dinners, chef’s tables, community storytelling nights, and even collaborative cooking classes. We curate the “architecture of time and space” so that dining doesn’t feel like a chore—it feels like coming home.
Food as a Foundation for the Whole Student
The Oxford Handbook emphasizes that well-being isn’t just the absence of illness—it’s about flourishing. That includes having access to basic needs (like nutrition), as well as the opportunity to develop socially, emotionally, and ethically.
Next Gen dining addresses this head-on:
- Nutritional Access: Our strategic planning ensures that dining halls serve inclusive, nutrient-dense meals that reflect a diversity of dietary needs—halal, kosher, vegan, allergen-friendly.
- Equity & Inclusion: We empower schools to break down cultural barriers through food storytelling, where students share their identities via cuisine.
- Emotional Support: Our environments are trauma-informed, acoustically mindful, and emotionally safe—important features for neurodiverse or anxious students.
- Community Co-Creation: We invite students into the planning process, allowing them to shape the experience. This autonomy fuels intrinsic motivation and a sense of purpose.
Bridging Research & Practice: The Implementation Science of Social Dining
The Oxford Handbook calls for a stronger bridge between research and real-world application, a challenge they note is often neglected. This is where PKC’s evidence-based methodology and success-fee model provide distinct value.
We do not deliver cookie-cutter plans. We deliver tailored strategies grounded in behavioral science, operational metrics, and our decades of experience. And we don’t just hand off the strategy—we partner with the institution to select and onboard food service operators who align with these transformative goals. Our compensation is tied to outcomes, meaning we only succeed when our clients succeed.
This is implementation science in action: translating the theory of well-being into the practice of transformation.
Dining as the Epicenter of Student Success
Let’s stop pretending dining is just an auxiliary service. It is a mission-critical component of student success. When designed and managed correctly, dining is:
- A social incubator for building lifelong friendships.
- A behavioral intervention to combat loneliness and depression.
- A resilience laboratory where students develop interpersonal skills and empathy.
- An equity engine that ensures every student—regardless of background—has a seat at the table, both literally and figuratively.
This is not hypothetical. Institutions that implement our Next Gen Dining strategies have seen measurable gains in retention, housing occupancy, emotional well-being, elimination of food and nutrition insecurity, and, yes, academic performance.
Final Thoughts: Beyond Surviving, Toward Thriving
As the Oxford Handbook so eloquently states, “Higher education institutions have a unique opportunity and responsibility to go beyond mitigating ill-being and actually cultivate well-being.” This is not a slogan—it’s a call to action. The stakes have never been higher, and the solutions have never been clearer.
Dining is not just about feeding students—it’s about nourishing their futures. Through SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Next Generation Dining Programs, we are helping institutions turn their campuses into ecosystems of connection, compassion, and community.
If we reimagine the purpose of dining, we reimagine the purpose of education.
Let’s serve more than food. Let’s serve belonging.