Mentoring and Academic Persistence Among Black College Students

The college graduation rate for Black students remains below that of the national average in the US. This may be due in part to barriers that Black students encounter while navigating academic environments. Research suggests that discrimination and students’ experience of the university as unwelcoming may impact their intentions to persist through graduation. A growing body of literature suggests that mentoring may be beneficial in buffering the effects of these experiences and facilitating college graduation. Framed within Critical Race Theory and Social Cognitive Career Theory, the aims of this study were to understand and describe mentoring supports for Black college students, and to examine the role of contextual factors that influence their college self-efficacy and persistence intentions. Based on the literature, I hypothesized that there would be indirect relationships between independent variables of perceived discrimination and perceptions of the university environment and the outcomes of college self-efficacy and persistence intentions through ethnic identity and mentoring. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to test the proposed model in a sample of 206 Black college students. Results associated with the first research aim include mentoring benefits for Black students who lived on campus and who utilized more methods to communicate with mentors. Black students who indicated having more mentors reported more psychological and emotional support and expressed stronger agreement with having a role model. Results associated with the second research aim include that the hypothesized structural model was a good fit for the data and accounted for 32% of the variance in college self-efficacy and 20% of the variance in persistence intentions for Black students. Bootstrap analyses indicated that there were indirect effects of perceptions of the university and perceived discrimination on college self-efficacy and persistence intentions through mentoring and ethnic identity. Findings suggest that mentoring and ethnic identity may serve as protective factors against the effects of an unwelcoming college environment and perceived discrimination. The use of a cross-sectional design limits directional and causal inferences. Future research should assess the impact of mentoring relationships over time for Black college students. Study strengths, limitations, and implications for research and practice are discussed