. At this point in life, the chance of choosing a higher education course and later regretting it is great. First, the interests of students at this age can be varied, and many face difficulties in matching them to a specific career, mainly due to the lack of information about the courses available. Difficulties increase when students are the first generation in their family to attempt a university career.
In response to this challenge, many schools have been working on this by bringing professionals from different areas to talk about their careers. However, these initiatives are not always sufficient. Furthermore, both offering support for their choices and disapproving of them, even going so far as to pressure them to follow a specific career path.
Dropouts throughout higher education and dissatisfaction with the chosen course raise concerns about the adequacy of the guidance received during the transition from high school to college. This situation is even worse for students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with limited access to better information and role models.
The article , by Stefania Bortolotti and Annalisa Loviglio, sheds light on this discussion. The authors carried out a field experiment in , in 2022, in which they evaluated the effects of a mentoring program, associating a mentor with a student, on the choice of university courses taken by students. The meetings, held virtually, took place two to three times during the last year of high school, months before the selection of undergraduate courses. Furthermore, the intervention involved mentors from areas linked to Stem (, , engineering and ) or , which have high expected returns in the job market.
To evaluate the impact of the intervention, the authors conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) considering 337 students from various parts of Italy. The program was promoted virtually by a large Italian university with the participation of thousands of students. To sign up, students had to fill out a questionnaire with various demographic information, including a list of areas of study of interest, ranked in order of preference. Based on this information, mentors and mentees, of both sexes, were paired and divided into a treatment and control group. Only treaties were assigned a mentor. The control group received a response stating that due to the high number of applicants, it was not possible to assign a mentor.
The results are interesting. There is an increase in the probability of choosing the mentor area of 22 percentage points compared to the control group. In relation to the chosen areas, there is an increase in the probability of choosing STEM or economics areas of study, a decrease in humanities, and there is no effect for professions in the medical field. Although the experiment did not have the specific objective of analyzing gender, the results point to an increase in the enrollment of female students in these studies.
This experiment highlights how better guidance and more information about careers can make students’ academic lives easier and also generate an average increase of 3% to 3.7% in mentees’ prospective salaries compared to the control group.
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