How rural community college students say mentorship shapes their academic and career experiences

Data Note 4 in the Rural Learners Success Series

When one rural community college student joined a mentoring program, transferring to a four-year university was not part of their original plan. But with steady encouragement and support from mentors, that path began to feel possible. Reflecting back, the student said they might not have made it through community college, let alone transferring to a four-year university, without the support of their mentors.

For many rural community college students, pursuing a postsecondary education often means having to navigate an unfamiliar system, balancing work, academic, and familial responsibilities, and figuring out their next academic and career steps along the way. In our most recent data note from the Rural Learner Success project, we draw on students’ experiences to better understand how mentorship shapes their academic and career experiences and outcomes.

What students told us

When we asked students whether and how mentorship had influenced their academic and career experiences, we learned that:

Mentorship helped students move forward during moments of uncertainty, especially when they were unsure about their academic direction. Encouragement from mentors helped students stay enrolled, clarify their roles, and feel more confident about their academic and career choices.
Mentorship introduced students to new academic and career possibilities. Students shared that throughout their conversations with their mentors, they were able to explore career options they had not considered before. For some, these conversations expanded what was possible, while for others, they confirmed they were on the right path.
Mentorship provided someone to turn to. For students, it was very important to have someone who listened, checked in, and helped them navigate the challenges they faced, which was critical, especially for first-generation college students.

What this means for rural-serving community colleges

Students’ reflections underscore the importance of mentorship being more than just providing information. It is about building relationships that help students navigate academic and career decisions, access resources, and feel supported as they navigate their college journey. At the same time, there were a few student recommendations that rural-serving community colleges should consider to further support their students: 1) more opportunities for one-on-one conversations with mentors, 2) increased visibility, access, and support for mentorship opportunities, and 3) more opportunities to connect with mentors who share or more strongly align with students’ diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Interested in learning more?

We invite you to read the full Data Note to learn more about how students at rural-serving community colleges describe mentorship shaping their academic and career pathways.

Rooted in Community: Four Elements of Effective Rural-Responsive Mentorship

Data Note 3 in the Rural Learners Success Series

Mentoring is a high-impact practice that strengthens student persistence—especially for learners navigating systemic inequities—yet rural community college students often face compounded barriers (distance, fewer services, and the time pressures of work and caregiving) that make sustained mentoring harder to access. Because many mentoring frameworks were designed outside rural and community college contexts, adapting them to these settings by leveraging rural strengths—tight-knit relationships, reciprocity, and community networks—can surface otherwise untapped supports in places where staffing and funding are limited.

In our third data note of the Mapping Effective Mentorship for Rural Community College Students project, we present a working model of Adaptive Rural-Responsive Mentorship, to serve as something colleges can adapt, question, and build upon as they deepen their own approaches to rural-responsive mentorship, and the Data Note includes a worksheet to facilitate this process.

This rural-responsive model was derived by adapting general mentoring practices that were most salient to themes from interviews with 25 mentees, and 27 mentors and mentor programming staff across seven rural-serving community colleges and refined through dialogue with rural college leaders at the Rural Community College Alliance Conference. Together, these perspectives ground the model in the lived experiences of rural students and the practitioners who support them.

Across interviews, effective rural mentorship consistently reflected four elements that will feel familiar to many practitioners—while also showing how rural context gives each one a distinct “shape.”:

Relational trust through tight-knit interrelationships and reciprocity, often built through consistency, shared community ties, and personal connection
Holistic support through personal and responsive care attuned to rural material realities, including attention to basic needs like transportation, childcare, and food security
Engaging and supporting identity and belonging shaped by place and culture, by affirming students’ languages, role of family, and community knowledge
Cultivating resource connection through bridging rural community networks, by helping students access opportunities beyond the campus

While these four elements resonated strongly, college leaders also emphasized that their application is shaped by the daily institutional conditions that determine what’s possible. Three themes stood out:

Mentorship must evolve with students and context, as rural student experiences, responsibilities, and needs continue to change
Sustaining trust through collaboration and continuity, particularly amid staff transitions, shifting roles, and limited institutional capacity
Centering culture, belonging, and resource connection, as core conditions for persistence rather than add-ons to mentoring work

We invite you to reflect on these findings by considering which elements already show up in your mentoring work and which feel hardest to sustain. We also encourage teams to consider how these mentee, mentor, and practitioner insights might inform more impactful mentorship experiences for your students, and how the model may continue to be adapted to rural contexts. The worksheet included in Data Note 3 offers a starting point for this kind of reflection and discussion.

Read the full publication!

Charting Practices and Critical Mentorship Strategies for Rural Community College Students

Mentoring is a powerful tool for enhancing student persistence and success, especially for students who face greater entrenched systematic injustice in higher education. This is particularly important for rural students, who combined with the challenges faced by community college students, represent a group often underserved by traditional mentorship programs. In our second data note of the Mapping Effective Mentorship for Rural Community College Students project, we highlight mentorship programs and practices at rural-serving community colleges (RSCCs) that can support student success and address the systemic inequities they face in achieving their goals. We invite you to reflect on these findings and how your institution can apply these insights to create more impactful mentorship experiences for your students. Read Data Note 2 and join the conversation on how we can strengthen mentorship for rural community college students.

Why this Data Note Matters

Rural-community colleges are a key points of entry to paths toward greater economic security and choice for minoritized populations, yet high-impact mentoring programs informed by and specific to this unique role and their distinct rural contexts are sparse. This data note provides actionable strategies and considerations for practitioners to strengthen mentorship programs for rural community college students at their colleges.

Key Insights

Building Empowering and Inclusive Mentorship Spaces: Learn how mentorship programs at RSCCs strive to create a safe and inclusive environment that can foster student reflection, agency, and advocacy to challenge the power structures they encounter in higher education and beyond.
Cultural Identity and Community Engagement in Mentorship: Explore how mentorship programs are embracing students’ cultural identities. These protective practices can amplify students’ community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), which can buffer students from the exclusive power structures encountered in higher education and enhance persistence and overall goal attainment.

Additionally, we invite you to share our survey below with students who receive mentorship to help us further understand how we can enhance mentorship strategies and better support rural students. Please click here to learn more about our student survey.

Click here to read the full data note.

Rural Community College Mentees Wanted!

This is the third phase of a three-phase study. A description of the prior phases and what we learned can be found in our Data Note 2 for this project. We are gathering a nationwide sample, surveying students who are or have experienced mentoring at rural-serving institutions to learn about potential differences and commonalities in the needs, barriers, and mentoring best-practices they identify. Each respondent will receive $10 in the form of a gift card of their choice, and will be entered to win an Apple iPad. Respondents can also be someone who has left their community college but experienced mentoring there in the recent past.

Our three-phase study, Mapping Effective Mentorship for Rural Community College Students, seeks to provide a comprehensive assessment of the descriptions of mentoring programs at rural-serving community colleges in the United States, to understand these programs from the mentor and mentee perspective, to find practices that are especially responsive to students at these institutions, and to highlight and begin a dialogue with practitioners regarding how these practices can be applied and expanded in other mentoring programs.

Students at rural-serving community colleges often face greater systemic inequities, but extant mentoring models were not devised with this population in mind. Thus, we were particularly interested in programs that took these systematic factors into account, and that supported students to navigate and advocate for themselves within these contexts.

The 15-minute survey asks about these and other mentoring supports, what could be improved, and what impact the students felt their mentoring experiences had on their academic and career plans. Respondents who have recently departed community college are invited to share their retrospective experiences. Each respondent will receive $10 in the form of a gift card which they will choose from 100+ options via the Tango card system. Respondents who opt in will also be entered in a drawing to win an Apple iPad.

One reason mentoring for students at rural-serving community colleges is under-examined and underdeveloped is the inherent difficulty in directly collecting representative nationwide data with these students. Outreach through practitioners and institutional stakeholders is especially critical for this research. Thus, if you work with or are connected to someone who mentors these students, please pass the information about this survey along.

The leaderboard tracking the states from which the survey has thus far received the most responses, as well as a brief explanation of the survey, including a flyer for dissemination, can be found on our website here. Thank you for your help in uncovering the best ways to support rural community college students!

Bridging the Rural Mentorship Gap: A Data Note on Mentorship Programs in Rural Community Colleges

A recent data note, the first in a series, published by the Community College Research Initiatives and generously funded by the Ascendium Education Group as part of its Building Evidence to Increase Rural Learner Success initiative, examines mentorship programs at public 2-year rural-serving institutions (RSIs). Using institutional website data, it explores the prevalence, distribution, and focus of mentorship programs, shedding light on who these programs serve and the variations across states.

The findings highlight an asymmetry in the distribution and location of mentorship programs across 444 public 2-year RSIs. While 301 of the 444 RSIs had at least one mentorship program, the number of programs ranged from one to eight per institution. A large proportion of mentorship programs lacked an explicit focus on underrepresented student groups. Approximately 3 out of 10 programs (29%) explicitly targeted low-income students, and 10 percent of programs targeted specific racial/ethnic student groups in their program descriptions. The analysis also found that many website descriptions did not provide clear information on who was providing the mentoring and how mentorship was defined.

These findings inform our future questions:

Mentorship: How is mentorship defined, and who is providing the mentoring? What structures are embedded within mentorship programs that support the success of rural community college students?
Rural Student Experience: How do mentorship programs impact the academic and career outcomes of rural community college students?
Intersectionality: How do mentorship experiences align with rural students’ evolving needs and intersectional identities, including low-income and racially minoritized students?
Best Practices: What best practices can be identified to inform mentoring models that are adaptable and tailored across institutions to support the success of rural community college students? How can programs better cater to the unique needs of students residing in rural communities? How does rurality play a role in program design and implementation?

In the next phase of this research, CCRI is exploring these questions through in-depth interviews with staff and student support practitioners, focus groups with students, and a national student survey. The “Landscape of Mentorship Programs at Rural Serving Community Colleges” data note serves as a starting point for understanding the availability of mentorship programs across public 2-year RSIs. As this research progresses, the insights this work provides will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of mentorship in rural settings, guide the development of inclusive and effective mentorship programs for rural students, and work towards bridging critical gaps in serving historically underserved students at RSIs.

New Research Scientist Mayra Nunez Martinez

It is with great pleasure that we introduce our newest research scientist, Mayra Nunez Martinez whose research centers on reimagining and transforming postsecondary institutions to better serve historically underserved students and communities. Informed from both personal and professional experiences her research is accountable to examining the racial and spatial inequities that rural Latine/x students face in higher education. She brings a unique lens to CCRI’s work, particularly for our grant on Building Evidence to Increase Rural Learner Success funded by Ascendium Education Group. She understands that it is critical to better support these communities, as rural communities are often excluded from national conversations around education, and there are substantive gaps in the literature for issues in rural higher education.

As a first-generation, DACAmented Mexicana and former college access advisor and high school teacher, she is committed to removing the systemic and structural barriers that exist for underserved communities in accessing higher education. Currently, she is working toward her Ph.D. in School Organization and Education Policy at the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation work examines how institutional and structural factors influence rural Latine/x students’ community college transfer decisions and outcomes.

“As educators and scholars, we must critically analyze policies, programs, and resources to make college accessible for all students by acknowledging the unique needs of students based on their intersectional identities and experiences.”

Through her collaborations on various projects as a graduate student researcher for the California Education Lab and Wheelhouse, she supported data collection, analyses, and dissemination of research related to higher education access and equity issues. For example, she contributed to projects examining factors influencing Latinx community college choice, first-time Latinx students’ and parents’ college choices during the pandemic, and how recruitment and outreach strategies can be more culturally and linguistically inclusive at emerging Hispanic serving institutions. From these experiences she learned the importance of using mixed research methods and centering students’ voices to understand how institutional practices and educational policies should be more responsive to their unique challenges and needs and how academic research utilizing researcher-practitioner partnerships can inform policy and practice.

These opportunities have provided her with invaluable experience that will contribute to CCRI’s research in this and other areas as well as continue to gain more tools for advancing educational equity to postsecondary opportunities for rural Students of Color.

CCRI Team Attending November Rural Learners Convening in Minneapolis!

In November, our CCRI team will be attending an in-person convening in advance of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, hosted by Ascendium and the American Institutes of Research. We look forward to meeting with other grantees who are part of the Building Evidence to Increase Rural Learner Success Initiative! To learn more about fellow grantees and their projects, click here.

CCRI research scientist Mayra Nunez Martinez will also be presenting her work that examines how geography impacts transfer rates for rural Latinx students in California on Saturday, November 18th, at 2:00 p.m. Browse sessions by person via the ASHE Conference Portal or view the conference schedule.

The UW’s Community College Research Initiatives receives $449,535 grant to increase rural educational equity

The University of Washington’s Community College Research Initiatives announced that it received a $449,535 grant from Ascendium Education Group for research to increase rural learner success.

Community College Research Initiatives (CCRI) conducts research to facilitate the advancement of equity in higher education. Ascendium invests in research that helps to build a body of evidence about how to ensure rural learners from low-income backgrounds can achieve their postsecondary education and career goals. Ascendium expects this investment in CCRI’s research will catalyze action affecting policies and practices grounded in high-quality evidence and research.

The CCRI project will address mentorship program gaps through a multisite, three-stage study of mentorship programs at public rural community colleges across the United States. Drawing upon institutional websites, in-depth interviews and student survey responses, this project will benefit both scholars and practitioners by producing a database of mentoring strategies at rural community colleges.

“We at CCRI are excited for the opportunity to learn how rural two-year institutions across the country are supporting students from low-income backgrounds with mentorship programs,” shared CCRI director, Lia Wetzstein, Ph.D. The CCRI data will advance the understanding of how the evidence-based solution of mentoring is being implemented at rural colleges while gauging the student experience with a primary focus on students from low-income backgrounds and racially minoritized students.

“We are grateful to Ascendium Education Group for their support,” Wetzstein continued. Ascendium is interested in generating evidence about practices and programs that increase the completion of high-quality postsecondary education and training and successful transition to high-quality jobs. Through the CCRI analysis of the nationwide landscape of rural community college mentorship and mentorship experiences, this project will produce models of mentorship to specifically address the rural community college context and rural students’ experience.

Last year CCRI was awarded a $1.2 million grant from Ascendium to work toward equity in STEM education for low-income learners across Washington state. CCRI, a program within Undergraduate Academic Affairs at the UW, is an influential contributor in community college and transfer partnership research identifying strategies that help students transfer to four-year institutions and complete their bachelor’s degrees. To learn more about CCRI, visit https://www.washington.edu/ccri/.

Ascendium Education Group is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to helping people reach the education and career goals that matter to them. Ascendium invests in initiatives designed to increase the number of students from low-income backgrounds who complete postsecondary degrees, certificates and workforce training programs, with an emphasis on first-generation students, incarcerated adults, rural community members, students of color and veterans. Ascendium’s work identifies, validates and expands best practices to promote large-scale change at the institutional, system and state levels, with the intention of elevating opportunity for all. For more information, visit https://www.ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

For more information or to get involved, contact CCRI, ccri@uw.edu.