Colleges and universities are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their effectiveness in enhancing student success and employability. Traditional metrics used by researchers and policymakers—such as time to degree completion, postgraduate employment and income—have predominantly overlooked the diversity of student pathways during and after college. The narrow focus has prompted calls for a more comprehensive framework that emphasizes a broader spectrum of pathways to student engagement and success. We introduce a novel multi-engagement model of the research university environment that highlights the significance and interconnectedness of various college experiences: academic engagement in classroom settings; research activities; and extracurricular, civic, and career development. We show that these different experiences and their variable combination are related to distinct and diverse pathways to success. Leveraging over 800,000 survey responses collected between 2012 and 2023 by the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium, the study examines trends in student engagement at 22 US research-intensive universities across five domains: academic, research, extracurricular, civic, and career. We explore interplay among these forms of engagement and their relationship to learning outcomes and student plans.