Having a mentor is one of the most powerful things that can happen for an undergraduate student and yet only 25% of students say they "strongly agree" that they had a meaningful mentor. insidehighered.com/quicktakes/201…
The most common and most meaningful source of mentorship is a professor. 64% of those who said they had a mentor identified a professor. Next highest was staff member at 10%.
Arts and humanities professors are the most common mentors at 43%, next is Science and Engineering at 28%. Business comes in at 9%. (You'll need to download the survey to see all the data.) stradaeducation.gallup.com/reports/244058…
So, mentoring matters a lot to students, professors are the most likely mentor, Arts & Humanities is the largest source of mentoring professors. A&H is also the most subject to adjunctification, leaving huge swaths of those teaching in a position where mentoring is very difficult
If you are contingent, moving from institution to institution, mentoring is difficult. If you only teach intro-level courses, it is hard to establish the kind of mentoring relationship which will be meaningful. Never mind the lack of time, incentive, or compensation for the work.
I was going to blog about this, but realized I already did. I got intentionally cheeky with the title. Mentoring matters to students, but institutional policies make it clear that those in charge don't see it as a priority. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
