Students Think Faculty Should Be Mentors. What Does That Look Like?

A May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found over half (55 percent) of students believe their professors are at least partly responsible for being a mentor. “Being a mentor” was the most popular response out of a list of eight options of responsibilities a professor could have in career development work; the second most popular was “preparing students for careers” at 52 percent.

“It’s an understandable, logical, desirable ambition,” says Jason Hendrickson, professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, part of the City University of New York system, and a CUNY Career Success Leadership Fellow. “I think students deserve that and it’s something that I, personally … believe should be faculty members’ responsibility.”

Mentoring is not a new expectation for faculty members, says Emily J. Isaacs, executive director of the Office for Faculty Excellence at Montclair State University. Rather, it’s a natural and appropriate role for faculty to take on, particularly in the world of academe.

“Mentoring [and sharing], ‘this is my journey, this is the journey of students who have come before you’ is fundamental to the faculty role,” Isaacs says.

Career-specific elements of mentoring, such as introducing students to jobs or supporting them with an internship hunt, is a growing focus in the faculty world. Faculty members share the fundamentals of mentorship, how to create organic bonds between professors and learners, and systemic interventions that can support this work.

Survey says: Students at private nonprofit institutions were more likely to indicate they believe professors should be career-related mentors (67 percent) compared to their public institution peers (53 percent) and those at two-year colleges (49 percent). Traditional-age students (57 percent) were also more likely to think of their professors as responsible for mentoring compared to their older adult peers (49 percent).

Similarly, students with at least one parent who holds a four-year degree were more likely to want mentorship from their faculty members (58 percent), compared to first-generation students (50 percent).

A complementary survey of student success professionals, defined as director level or above, produced similar results.

Half of the 199 student success professionals surveyed earlier this year by Inside Higher Ed and Hanover Research believe faculty members are at least partially responsible for being a mentor (51 percent). A greater number said they believe faculty members are responsible for career development through preparing students with skills (68 percent) or showing how careers in their field are evolving (59 percent).

Administrators at private nonprofits were more likely to say faculty should be involved in mentorship (65 percent).

A 2023 faculty survey at CUNY (including over 1,600 full-time and part-time faculty across colleges in the system) found 94 percent of respondents consider it a responsibility to prepare students for their professional aspirations. However, seven in 10 respondents think faculty are not trained and closer to eight in 10 respondents believe faculty are not incentivized to integrate career-relevant information into the curriculum.

Becoming a mentor: The old adage is that professors weren’t taught to teach. But many have been mentored through research.

“If you talk about academic faculty, they mostly have a Ph.D. or a degree beyond their bachelor’s, and we tend to be imprinted by our own experience as a mentee, as a graduate student,” says Roel Snieder, W. M. Keck Distinguished Chair of Professional Development Education at Colorado School of Mines. “That can work out really well, and it can be a disaster.”

Not everyone is equipped to be a mentor, but “we’d like to help everyone become the best mentor they can be,” says Sebastian Alvarado, assistant professor biology at Queens College, CUNY, and a career success leadership fellow.

An effective mentorship pair, to Snieder, has at least three key ingredients: trust, fun and perspective. A mentee must trust their mentor to have difficult conversations and be honest, the pair should enjoy spending time together, and the mentor must see their mentee for who they are, not as a clone of themselves.

“They are individuals with different hopes and dreams and ambitions,” Snieder says. “You must also be able to take a step back and see that and honor that.”

“[Students] aren’t going to remember all the content that we throw at them throughout the course of the year, but they’re going to remember the ways in which we guide them to move, to become successful in life,” says Punita Bhansali, assistant professor at Queensborough Community College and CUNY Career Success Leadership Fellow.

The career fellows at CUNY are particularly focused on helping faculty talk about curricular learning as a piece of students’ development through higher education, such as calling out career competencies in syllabi and investing in faculty development. Guiding students through career exploration and seeing the possibility of jobs beyond their major is one clear area faculty can serve as a mentor, Bhansali says.

Making the match: Isaacs considers the role of professional or faculty advising as one way that institutions have standardized faculty mentoring. By providing students with a professional adviser who can focus more on the technical elements of degree mapping or transfer of credit, faculty have more opportunities to provide personalized support and coaching in their discipline.

“It’s kind of a cherished chore—it’s fun,” Isaacs says.

Prior research shows some faculty members are more likely to take on the emotional or invisible labor of caring for students, including faculty of color or those belonging to the LGBTQ+ community. Providing opportunities to standardize formal mentorships, like faculty advising, can help address this.

But making the mentorship match can be complicated. The best relationships happen organically (like dating, Snieder says), and often students need to be taught how to establish relationships with their faculty, which limits these opportunities for authentic connection.

“Students are not very proactive to make mentorship a reality,” Snieder says. Students are willing to say mentorship is the responsibility of the faculty, but are students willing to take responsibility for their mentoring relationship with faculty?

A 2021 Student Voice survey found two in 10 students had participated in a formal mentorship program organized by their institution. Among students who had mentors (of any kind, not just with faculty), most first encountered their mentor in class (57 percent) or through a club or organization (36 percent).

Building a mentoring relationship doesn’t require enormous effort, Snieder says. “Sometimes by doing things as simple as, I would teach in a different building, they would always walk with me back to my own building. That led to both a mentoring relationship and very often a research collaboration.”

Proactive steps from students can facilitate deeper bonds and learning between professors, but faculty members can also demonstrate vulnerability to signal their own humanities.

Alvarado from Queens College does this through speaking Spanish with students, either after class or dropping a comment during a lecture, which he says helps show his class is a safe space for bilingual students or that there aren’t cultural barriers between them. He’ll also share stories from his own early-career experiences.

“I’m a failed circus performer and magician. Before I started graduate school, I performed,” Alvarado says. “I did a lot of things growing up, as a kid, as a teenager and as a young adult that I thought were going to be my career, and I share this stuff.” By being open with students, he finds they’re more likely to reciprocate.

Put into practice: A systematic question needs a programmatic answer, Hendrickson of LaGuardia says, so addressing inequities in mentorship requires strategic interventions. Faculty provide ways their colleagues and institutional leaders can help create connections with learners:

• Educate students on the value of mentorship. Faculty members can call out the value of having a mentor to students in class. Snieder has used a New York Times article by Frank Bruni to kick off conversations about taking advantage of mentorship. “Distributing this paper among your students is the simplest thing you can do. It costs zero time. The next simplest thing is giving it to students and then having a class conversation about it for 10 minutes,” he says.
• Demonstrate care as a faculty member. Showing empathy and patience in the classroom goes a long way in building trust with students, says Bhansali of Queensborough. “If you’re always too hung up on getting through a certain amount of content … your students are going to see that. Whereas, if you’re OK with stopping and encourage more conversations, more discussion, space to ask questions and be confused … this type of thinking is what makes students more comfortable to approach you.”
• Open up spaces beyond the classroom. Creating less formal environments for professor-student interaction can facilitate interpersonal connections. Teaching class outside the traditional classroom, hosting events within the department, creating experiential learning opportunities or making office hours more casual can all support this effort, Hendrickson says. Montclair State hosts a faculty panel of first-generation graduates to connect them with current students as one strategy to improve opportunities for learners.
• Encourage a constellation of mentorship. “Some of the first advice that I give to any student is to find another mentor,” Alvarado says. “We need to move away from this guru aspect of mentoring, where one person can answer all of your questions and solve everything,” and instead encourage students to build a network of professionals who can support them.
• Consider equity. To create opportunities for all students, institutions may have to create tailored supports or structures that give learners a leg up in making mentorship bonds. “I think we owe these students extra help,” Snieder says.

We bet your colleague would like this article, too. Send them this link to subscribe to our weekday newsletter on Student Success.