Does Career Mentoring Enhance College Readiness? Experimental and Social Validity Evidence from Detroit of Career Mentoring Impacts, Mechanisms, and Program Improvement

This dissertation includes three manuscripts that evaluate career mentoring as an approach to enhancing Detroit students’ college readiness. Recent trends reveal that most Detroit high school graduates are not prepared for college, and so, not surprisingly, even though about half of all graduates pursue higher education, college persistence is low and the vast majority of students never earn degrees. Low rates of postsecondary educational attainment demand a response, and educational and community organizations, thus, aim to support Detroit young people on their paths towards higher education. Career mentoring is one way that community members have tried to support Detroit’s young people. Since 1994, the Winning Futures (WF) career mentoring organization has partnered with Metro Detroit schools to pair young people with professionals within their local communities. In partnership with WF, this dissertation investigated whether and how such an approach supports students. Specifically, I aimed to answer: How does career mentoring benefit students, with a particular focus on enhancing college readiness? What aspects of career mentoring seem particularly promising? And how might programs such as this one be improved to enhance the benefits for students? The first manuscript presents results from an experimental evaluation of the WF career mentoring program. Results of a randomized control trial assessed WF’s impact on students’ academic performance and college-ready attitudes. Classrooms participating during the 2019-2020 schoolyear were randomly selected. Outcomes measured included: students’ first semester grades, and self-reported self-efficacy, growth mindset, goal orientation, perseverance, and adult support. The results suggested that career mentoring enhances college readiness both attitudinally and academically, although many of the findings lacked statistical significance. The second manuscript presents a subjective evaluation of WF. Using a social validity framework, I share the perspectives of WF participants on the social importance of the program’s effects and the perceived mechanisms through which the program benefits students. I facilitated a total of fifteen focus groups and interviews with participating students, mentors, and classroom teachers. The results supported the quantitative findings that career mentoring enhances college readiness, particularly in its effects on non-cognitive and navigational factors. Additionally, the findings highlighted several avenues through which career interventions operate. Importantly, I found that strong mentoring relationships provide an essential foundation upon which the impacts of career mentoring depend. The third manuscript explored how career mentoring programs might enhance the benefits students receive by encouraging more frequent student-mentor virtual communication. I present the results of an experiment that tested a light-touch nudge intervention designed to encourage mentors to reach out more often via text message, email, or phone. Unexpectedly, the results showed that, although there were no differences in the overall frequency of mentors’ outreach, the intervention resulted in lower ratings of student responsiveness (both self-reported and mentor-reported) and less-frequent student-initiated outreach. Additionally, mentors who were encouraged to reach out gave worse ratings of their relationships with students at the end of the program, and students of treated mentors gained less from the program in terms of their college-ready attitudes. Exploratory analyses examined possible causal mechanisms driving the intervention’s negative impacts. Taken together, the study’s findings point to the limitations of behavioral interventions to encourage relational practices and underscore the importance of carefully considering the content of nudges to ensure that reminders messages ultimately enhance student support.PhDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/169909/1/slbrock_1.pd