Peer-mentoring of students in rural and low ses schools

7Summary and implications of findings

Rural young people have lower rates of participation than metropolitan youth in higher education. Similarly, low-SES young people are less likely than those of high-SES backgrounds to enter higher education.

The mechanisms by which rural background and low socioeconomic status operate on higher education participation include achievement, attitude and aspiration. We find no differences between rural and metropolitan students in their achievement at age 15 years and their attitudes towards school. We do find differences in their aspirations for post-school study and careers, with rural students holding lower aspirations for post-school education and lower career expectations than metropolitan students.

Low-SES students are very much less likely than high-SES youth to enter higher education. Low-SES students tend to have lower achievement, less favourable attitudes towards school and lower aspirations for post-school study and careers.

Our multivariate analyses reveal that location itself does not predict higher education participation, but we do find a very strong effect for socioeconomic status. Moreover, we find possible mediating influences, specifically, that rural and low-SES students have lower aspirations for post-school study and lower career expectations. In addition, low-SES students also have less favourable attitudes towards school. Both aspiration and attitude towards school are positively correlated with participation in post-school education.

One of the ways of addressing low aspirations and intentions for post-school study is through mentoring programs. Through mentoring, rural and low-SES students recognise barriers to post-school participation, but also find models and means by which these barriers can be reduced.

Government policy responses (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations 2009) to the Bradley et al. (2008) recommendations to establish targets for low-SES participation in higher education appear to be well supported. Increasing funding to universities for low-SES enrolments, reducing the age of independence to facilitate student income support and raising the income threshold should all assist low-SES and rural students, the latter who must leave home and find part-time work to support themselves in order to participate in higher education. The extent to which these changes influence intentions for and enrolment in higher education by low-SES and rural young people remain to be seen. The current study uses the most recently available data (2010) for the Y03 cohort, and this predates the introduction of the revised Youth Allowance and Austudy arrangements, which are being fully implemented in 2012 (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations 2009).

Investigation 2: the effects of a mentoring program

The analyses from the intentions, achievement and attainment of metropolitan and rural students section of this report indicate that location acts upon higher education attainment through the mechanisms of achievement, attitude and aspiration. Both rural and low-SES schools have low transition rates to university following school completion (Bradley et al. 2008). Therefore, in order to increase rural and low-SES participation in higher education, one starting point is to target the attitudes toward, and aspirations for, higher education of students in rural and low-SES schools. This is the aim of the mentoring aspect of the present project.

Youth mentoring is one area which has been extensively examined in relation to a range of other issues, such as raising achievement levels, social adjustment and reducing behavioural conduct problems (for a comprehensive review, see Dubois et al. 2011). Clarke’s (2009, cited in Dubois et al. 2011) doctoral research involved a mentoring-based intervention to increase the academic performance of students at risk of failure; it purportedly found that the mentoring project had a substantial impact on the academic performance of students. Similarly, de Blank’s (2009, cited in Dubois et al. 2011) doctoral research reportedly found a small academic increase among female students mentored within a leadership program.

Although the literature demonstrates that academic performance can be improved by mentoring programs (Dubois et al. 2011), one area that has received little attention is the effect of mentoring programs on raising the aspirations for post-school study. Houston’s (1999, cited in Dubois et al. 2011) unpublished doctoral research involved raising the aspirations of disadvantaged African-American students, reportedly raising student aspirations a relatively small amount.

To date, no published work has specifically investigated the role of mentoring in increasing student aspirations for higher education and certainly not within the Australian context. The present project sought to investigate the effectiveness of a mentoring program undertaken in one low-SES and one semi-rural school (a school that approached but did not meet the cut-offs for a rural school in terms of physical distance from metropolitan areas) in raising aspirations for post-school university study. Further, it sought to investigate what effects, if any, the mentoring program would have upon aspirations for vocational education in the form of intentions to attend a TAFE institute.

Why might mentoring raise students’ aspirations to attend university? There are several psychological theories that offer potential mechanisms for such an effect. First, a powerful determinant of human behaviour is the need to belong (Tajfel et al. 1971; Billig & Tajfel 1973). For this reason, people form social groups, classifying themselves as either in, or out of a designated group. Comparisons are then made between the groups the person identifies with (the ‘in-group’) and groups that the person does not identify with (the out-groups). As a result, behaviours that are considered concordant with the in-group norms are undertaken at a higher rate (Tajfel et al.1971; Billig & Tajfel 1973). If mentoring leads students to identify more with university students as an in-group, then this may, in turn, lead them to consider university to be a more viable education option for their future.

A second possible reason mentoring might affect education intentions is the availability heuristic. When information about choices is limited, people tend to evaluate options as more likely when they can more readily remember information about them (Tversky & Kahneman 1973). If mentors were to improve the amount of information students had about university, then this might lead them to recall that information more easily and thus evaluate university education as a more likely option for their future.

Thirdly, students who are mentored might alter their perception of the cognitive distance associated with university education. Cognitive distance includes both social distance and physical distances, which have been shown to be interrelated (Stephan, Lieberman & Trope 2010). Physical distances to desirable locations are typically remembered as being closer than distances to less desirable locations (Alter & Balcetis 2011), and threatening locations are typically represented as even further away (Xiao & Van Bavel 2012). The increased social contact with mentors may lead students to perceive university students as socially closer, while the contact with mentors may prompt students to perceive the university as being physically closer. In combination, these ‘perceptions’ may increase students’ likelihood of attendance.

Finally, we examined whether participants’ perceptions of the costs of attending university were lowered by contact with mentors, thereby removing the fear of excessive costs involved with attending university. Economic theories predict that, when perceptions of costs decrease, demand for a product increases (Shin 1985). If students in these schools perceive costs as high, but mentors reduce perceptions of the difficulties associated with meeting these costs, this may lead to an increase in intention to attend university.

One concern with any attempt to increase post-school university attendance is that the increase in the number of students who choose to attend university may reduce the number of students pursuing vocational education. At the time of this report, more than half of the skills listed as in shortage in Australia are vocational skills, typically available from a VET institution (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations 2011). The pursuit of an increase in the numbers with a university education could result in the inadvertent decrease in the trades-based skills of the country. Therefore, the present research sought to investigate whether the mentoring of students towards university uptake adversely affected their aspirations for further education in the form of VET courses.