In response to my recent post about the future of higher education and one-on-one mentoring, one of my students from last year, Yunze, got in touch via email to offer a potential solution:
...I wonder whether it is possible to set a clear academic threshold within each discipline. If students who reach this threshold could mentor upper‑middle‑level students, while professors spend only a small amount of time supervising the overall direction, the system might become more sustainable. However, I suspect this could harm the interests of the top students, since they might otherwise use that time to further advance their own academic achievements, and If [sic] they fail to successfully train students with real research ability, it would likely damage both the university’s reputation and the professor’s own reputation.
You know, I think Yunze is right on the money here. Consider the problems I outlined in the earlier post: (1) the signalling value of education is falling due to generative AI; (2) a one-on-one mentoring approach may be a solution; but (3) one-on-one mentoring doesn't scale due to limited faculty time. If one-on-one mentoring is not conducted between faculty and students, but works more like a pyramid mentoring model, then this might actually work, not just for students, but for faculty and for universities as well.
So, let's think it through. But first, remember that the mentoring model I introduced in the earlier post is not simply a model of small classes, where senior students perform limited teaching roles, such as tutoring. This is a model of genuine mentoring, where the mentor encourages the mentee to become a builder, in the words of Auren Hoffman. A builder creates things, and it is the act of building, and the learning alongside that, which will be a durable signal to future employers. In relation to mentoring, I said in that post that mentors should do the following for their mentees:
Teach them to be builders. Encourage them to create things. Work with them and chart a path forward for their success.
If faculty provide one-on-one mentoring to a small number of senior students, then that makes better use of faculty time than them mentoring hundreds of first-year students. The senior students can then each mentor several second-year students, who in turn can then mentor several first-year students. [*] In this model, faculty time is targeted at the senior students, where the impact of faculty on student employment outcomes may be greatest.
Students benefit from helping junior colleagues to become builders, where the signalling value may remain even in the face of generative AI. Even better, mentoring provides student mentors with an opportunity to build - they may be able to point employers to the success of their mentees as an example of their building, talking also about what went wrong in the mentoring relationship, and what they learned from the experience.
In this mentoring pyramid model, universities retain a key role, but that role becomes very different. Universities essentially become a platform, connecting students with mentors - first-year students with second-year mentors, second-year students with senior student mentors, and senior students with faculty mentors. In the terms of my earlier post, the university runs their own OnlyStudents platform.
Of course, this platform role creates a new problem for universities. If mentoring works mainly as a way of matching students with mentors, then the market may not need eight OnlyStudents platforms in New Zealand, or thousands of OnlyStudents platforms worldwide. A small number of large platforms could have a big advantage in that case - more students attract more mentors, more mentors improve the quality of matching, and better matching attracts still more students. Those network effects could create a winner-take-all dynamic, in which universities would struggle to differentiate themselves simply by running their own mentoring platforms, and where a single surviving OnlyStudents platform might be the ultimate outcome. However, that conclusion depends on the strength of the network effects. If effective mentoring also depends on institutional trust, disciplinary reputation, local employer connections, pastoral care, or an in-person community, then universities may retain some defensible advantages. Geography alone probably won’t be enough, especially if online mentoring is close to being as effective as in-person mentoring, but local connections might still matter. So the question for universities is not just whether they can build their own OnlyStudents, but whether they can attach that platform to something that a larger, more generic OnlyStudents cannot easily replicate.
Universities may also retain a role in the initial and ongoing training of mentors. Since each student, and each faculty member, will need to be a mentor to one or more others lower down in the pyramid, they will need to understand how to mentor. That means universities would not simply be matching students with mentors. They would also need to train mentors, monitor the quality of mentoring relationships, and intervene when mentor-mentee relationships are not working well. Moreover, the adoption of a mentoring pyramid model is likely going to change who the most successful students (and faculty members) are. The top students do not necessarily make the best mentors (or the best tutors, as I have learnt across years of coordinating tutors in my first-year papers). Good mentoring requires a specific skill set, but it is those skills that may also demonstrate the quality of the student as a builder - a signal of high quality for employers.
A further point about the pyramid mentoring model is that it likely requires a strong filtering effect to be financially viable. Since each faculty member can only mentor a limited number of senior students, and each of those senior students can only mentor a limited number of second-year students, who in turn can only mentor a limited number of first-year students, each level of the pyramid probably needs to be somewhat wider than the levels above it. To achieve that, student progression needs a strong filter, limiting the number of students who progress from first-year to second-year, and from second-year to senior.
Let's consider some simple numerical examples that illustrate why filtering is needed. If each faculty member mentors five senior students, and each senior student mentors five second-year students, who each mentor five first-year students, then the pyramid contains 155 students per faculty member - five senior students, 25 second-year students, and 125 first-year students. A model where each faculty member’s salary is covered by fees from 155 students, setting aside any contribution to central university costs, seems likely to be financially viable to me. However, in this model only one-fifth of students could be allowed to progress each year. That means the model would also need some form of orderly exit for students who are filtered out - perhaps an exit qualification, or a pathway into a non-mentored track. The problem is that both options may provide negative signals about the student who is filtered out.
If all students were to progress, then that would require each student to mentor at most one student at the level below. Keeping five senior students mentored by faculty, then the pyramid would contain 15 students per faculty member - five senior students, five second-year students, and five first-year students. That system would be much less likely to cover the cost of faculty time. So, it's unlikely that the pyramid mentoring model would be viable to run without some form of filtering - perhaps not as extreme as only one-fifth of students progressing each year, but clearly not all students could progress every year.
So, to return to my conclusion from the previous post, the current mass higher education model still looks increasingly fragile, but perhaps one or a few universities might be able to navigate their way through. However, the survivors are likely to be first-movers or fast followers in developing a platform market strategy that leverages a pyramid mentoring model. This model is still going to cost students a lot, and the filtering effect would make higher education more elitist as well.
And thanks to Yunze for inspiring this post with his perceptive email comments.
*****
[*] For simplicity, I'm assuming a three-year higher education degree structure, as we have in New Zealand. For a four-year degree structure, you would of course need to add an additional level.
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