TITLE:
Bridge Building in Higher Education: Multi-Modal Mentoring Programs to Support Retention & Career Preparedness
AUTHORS:
James Hutson, Roger Nasser, Michael Marzano, Ryan Curtis, Elizabeth MacDonald, Sue Edele, Barbara Hosto-Marti
KEYWORDS:
Mentorship, Peer Mentoring, Faculty Mentoring, Higher Education, Career Preparedness, Multi-Modal Design
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.13 No.9,
September
16,
2022
ABSTRACT: Despite the limitations on time for career preparedness and shrinking professional development budgets, mentoring remains as important as ever due to the interconnectedness in a global society and the changing demographics of postsecondary education students. The traditional-age population in college that lives on campus and doesnot work has been declining for over three decades. The majoritiesof current students that arenow non-traditional, and work at least part-time are first-generation, and are pursuing degrees via distance or online learning. The importance of providing a diverse mentoring strategy for thisnew population is borne out in research in order to improve retention, persistence, and completion rates, as well as future professional success. As such, this study sheds light on the need to develop a multi-modal mentoring program to support different student populations through a flexible combination of faculty-student, student-student, alumni-student, and supervisor-student mentoring programs applied in different contexts and modalities. While results indicate that overall faculty-initiated mentoring is preferred by both populations and the most impactful method for mentoring is face-to-face with a faculty member with non-academic experience in the field of their discipline, other approaches are more effective for populations, such as first-generation, minority, and online and graduate students.