Understanding the Role of Undergraduates’ Social Identities in Establishing and Cultivating Mentoring Relationships With Faculty

• In Event: Disrupting Racial Inequality in College Students’ Experiences: Insights From National Survey Research

Abstract

For many undergraduate students, faculty members represent some of the most critical, if not the only, institutional agents they encounter in college. Faculty serve as conduits of information and often represent gateways to future educational opportunities and career endeavors. Indeed, beyond students’ peers, faculty are regarded as the primary agents of socialization in college (Fuentes, Ruiz Alvarado, Berdan, & DeAngelo, 2014). Faculty’s distinct status in students’ undergraduate experience makes them uniquely situated to affect a variety of student outcomes (Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005, DeAngelo, 2010).

Faculty mentorship represents perhaps the most highly valued form of student-faculty interaction. Through mentoring experiences with faculty, students come to better understand disciplinary knowledge, develop important skills to review and analyze knowledge, and gain familiarity with cultural aspects of their disciplines or fields (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, & Medicine, 2019). Despite the gains colleges and universities have made in recent decades in recruiting and retaining a more diverse student body, the social identities of faculty, particularly with respect to race/ethnicity, have not kept pace. These critical changes in the makeup of students and faculty have made it even more complicated for underrepresented students to find and navigate mentoring relationships with faculty. In this study, we aim to understand how undergraduate students’ racial and ethnic identities relate to their propensity to identify a faculty mentor, the nature and frequency of their mentoring experiences, and their overall satisfaction with the mentorship they receive from faculty.

This study analyzed the most recent data collected from the College Senior Survey and the Freshman Survey collected by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. Our approach analyzes three distinct but related outcomes: students’ ability to identify a faculty mentor (dichotomous survey item); the frequency of mentorship (a latent measure developed using Item Response Theory [Sharkness et al., 2010]); and faculty mentorship satisfaction (an ordinal measure). We built our models in a such a way that we first seek to identify any key differences in each outcome by students’ social l identities (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, first-generation status). Then, we added curricular and extracurricular experiences as covariates to the model to understand how any gaps between identity groups can be attenuated by the nature and frequency of other activities students pursue while in college. Our models controlled for students’ background characteristics, pre-college dispositions toward interacting with teachers and staff in high school, goals and aspirations at the start of college, and curricular and extracurricular experience in college.

Findings from our analyses indicated significant differences across racial groups with respect to finding a mentor and the frequency with which students engaged with their mentors. White students more easily found faculty mentors and then interacted with those mentors significantly more often than students of color. Our full paper and presentation will provide a full accounting of all measures in the model and speak to how colleges and universities can establish a fairer and more equitable opportunity structure for students to locate faculty mentors and develop meaningful relationships with those critical institutional agents.

Author

• Kevin Eagan, University of California - Los Angeles