Students feel like they "belong" at Mason - but only recently

While I was looking for numbers about the age of Mason's faculty, I stumbled across an annual "Factbook" that's compiled by the Office of Institutional Research and Reporting. The document is packed with information on everything from where freshmen are from to how the university spends its money. 

But what caught my eye was survey results on how Mason students feel about the university. Here's what it showed:

(Graph provided by the Office of Institutional Research & Reporting)

In 1996, the "sense of belonging" at Mason was a meager 44 percent. Since then, that number has jumped to between 78 and 80 percent. That's about a fourty point jump over 18 years. It is interesting that the most dramatic shifts have occured between 1997 and 2003. Since then, the numbers have sat around the upper-70's. Why the sudden change within those six years?