Presentation on Peer Mentorship

According to Statistics Canada, over 2.1 million students enrolled in Canadian public universities and colleges for the 2017/2018 academic year (Stat Can, 2020). From a global perspective, this number is astronomical. Reports indicate that during this same time period, Canada was the most educated country in the world, with over 56-percent of adults aged 25-64 having been educated at the post-secondary level (CNBC, 2018). This, of course, is a great achievement for Canada, however one unfortunate biproduct of having such a large population of enrolled students is that the number of students who do not reach graduation is also relatively high. In 2018, Maclean’s ranked the top 49 universities in Canada by degree completion rates (Maclean’s, 2018). The magazine found that only six out of the 49 universities studied had degree completion rates of 80-percent or greater. Worse yet, the average completion rate for all 49 universities listed was only 71.3-percent. That remaining 28.7-percent represents hundreds of thousands of students annually who will experience the financial and psychosocial repercussions associated with ‘dropping out’. This is not only disadvantageous for these individuals, but for Canada’s workforce as well, due to the loss of many specialized workers. Peer mentorship programs have been presented as a cost-effective solution to this problem, however more research is required in terms of design, implementation, and evaluation of outcomes. Our study will seek to help close these gaps