Colleges and universities have long sought to improve their students' adjustment, retention, and likelihood of graduation (Berger, Ramírez, & Lyons, 2012). To help with this goal, institutions have increasingly attempted to identify students who are struggling early in college so that they can provide timely support and assistance. These early efforts can include a variety of institutional assessments or commercial tools. Some research has shown that social adjustment and engagement measures gathered approximately 1 month into the first semester can predict short-term college retention (Bowman, Miller, Woosley, Maxwell, & Kolze, 2019; Sun, Hagedorn, & Zhang, 2016). These results support the potential importance of understanding these initial experiences and perceptions; however, a problem with this strategy is that it depends on students voluntarily completing a survey, and students who are struggling to adjust may be the least likely to respond. A second problem is that surveys are introspective by nature, so even data obtained from students who do respond are prone to error (e.g., Herzog & Bowman, 2011). Therefore, the present study explored an alternative to traditional early-alert systems at residential institutions: using campus dining data to create an indicator of students' social networks. Key benefits of this approach are that students do not need to respond to institutional requests to provide information and that data collection is automatic and starts almost immediately when students arrive on campus. As a result, it is possible to use student behavior from as early as the first week or two of classes to inform individualized outreach efforts and support.