Relationships Are Central to the Student Experience. Can Colleges Engineer Them?

Just before the start of her freshman year at Denison University, Rachel Elfman showed up at the book-lined office of a professor she had never met. The professor, John H. Davis Jr., was really good, she’d heard from a couple of upperclassmen. But his introductory class in anthropology and sociology was full.

Ms. Elfman made her request politely: Could he let her into the class? At the time, she didn’t think there was anything too unusual about what she was doing. But Mr. Davis was struck by her boldness. Three years later, he still remembers the conversation. “She had to muster a little courage,” he says. He added her to his class.

Although she is not in the major — Ms. Elfman is studying economics and French — Mr. Davis has become an important mentor. This past fall she took another class with Mr. Davis, an assistant professor of anthropology and sociology. And their interactions extend beyond the classroom. Sometimes they meet for lunch. When Ms. Elfman has taken classes in Mr. Davis’s building, she occasionally swings by his office to share an idea, or just to say hello.

When Ms. Elfman returned from a semester abroad in France, she showed the professor her pictures. After her summer internship at a private-equity firm, she was eager to share a sociological observation: Although the company made a point of not assigning employees to specific desks, nearly everyone sat in the same place every day. Mr. Davis can appreciate such insights in a way that her family and friends might not, Ms. Elfman says. And she also knows that the professor genuinely cares.

Ask satisfied graduates what they have carried on from college, and you’ll probably hear about people. Long after they have forgotten much of the content learned in class, alumni maintain connections with friends, teachers, and, if they’re lucky, mentors like Mr. Davis. Having a mentor during college, research suggests, is linked to academic success and even graduates’ well-being.

These life-shaping relationships can feel dizzyingly random. Two students who happen to live down the hall from each other become lifelong friends. A freshman picks a professor’s course because it fits into her schedule, and she finds a mentor. Relationships are central to the college experience, but forming them comes down to chance.

Or does it? Denison’s president, Adam Weinberg, doesn’t think so. Mr. Weinberg is making a big push to put mentorship at the heart of the Denison experience. These important connections can’t be mandated, he says — relationships between students and professors, coaches, or staff members work best when they form organically. But it can be encouraged.

A college can carve out space and time for students and faculty members to interact, especially when research shows that it matters most: early in students’ careers and outside of the classroom. If a college builds the right structure and the right culture, Mr. Weinberg says, it can “dramatically increase the odds” that students find mentors. And doing so, he thinks, might be the key ingredient in what makes a college education meaningful for the long term.

Just a handful of interactions with a mentor can have an outsized influence. Mr. Weinberg knows this from personal experience. Early in his career, when he was an assistant professor of sociology at Colgate University, he was invited to nearby Hamilton College for an event: Seniors in Hamilton’s sociology department were presenting their capstone research plans. Mr. Weinberg was brought in as an outside reviewer.

That’s where he met Dan Chambliss. Mr. Weinberg, who was learning how to be a professor at a liberal-arts college after attending graduate school at a research university, was struck by the way Mr. Chambliss, a sociology professor at Hamilton, interacted with the students, how he knew them as individuals and helped each of them connect to their research.

Mr. Weinberg kept coming back for the event, and he made a point of talking with Mr. Chambliss during the dinner that always followed. He listened closely as Mr. Chambliss talked about the way he emphasized relationships in his classroom and his department.

The relationship between the two men has been intermittent. When Mr. Chambliss organized a series of small conferences on assessment that Mr. Weinberg attended, they spent more time together. When Mr. Weinberg left academe temporarily for World Learning, a nonprofit organization working in international development, education, and exchange programs, the two men largely fell out of touch.

Even though their interactions could be sporadic and brief, they had an impact on Mr. Weinberg. More than anything, Mr. Weinberg learned from Mr. Chambliss to think of colleges as collections of people, not programs.

Eventually they reconnected. Not long after Mr. Weinberg became president of Denison, Mr. Chambliss’s book How College Works (Harvard University Press, 2014) came out. The book is based on a decade’s worth of research by Mr. Chambliss and his co-author, Christopher Takacs, a former student, who followed almost 100 Hamilton students through and after college to determine which moments of their undergraduate trajectory really mattered. Their core finding: Relationships shape the student experience. And of those relationships, they write, the “most valuable” ones are mentorships.

Other evidence backs this up. The Gallup-Purdue Index investigates the connection between what students do in college and how they fare later in life. It found that graduates who “strongly agree” that they had a mentor who “encouraged me to pursue my goals and dreams” were twice as likely as all others to be engaged at work and thriving on the index’s measures of well-being. That made mentorship the strongest predictor of well-being out of anything that Gallup asked about.

But most people didn’t have a mentor in college. Just 22 percent of the alumni whom Gallup surveyed — in a sample of 70,000 adults of all ages and any alma mater — strongly agreed that they’d had one.

Gallup’s data show striking differences, by institution, in the share of graduates who were mentored, suggesting that colleges themselves play a significant role. While one might expect that students who went to elite colleges, or small ones, were more likely to have had a mentor, Gallup found that institutional type made little difference. Neither did the job title of the person serving as a mentor. What mattered, says Brandon Busteed, executive director of education and work-force development at the polling firm, was a college’s “intention.”

When Gallup took a closer look at some individual colleges — Denison wasn’t one it examined — it was able to trace high rates of mentorship back to efforts to foster such relationships. “This is the kind of thing institutions can move the needle on dramatically,” Mr. Busteed says.

That’s a sentiment Mr. Weinberg shares. When he got to Denison, he was struck by the strong connections students formed with professors and other mentor figures, like coaches. Here, he thought, was a success he could build on. After all, relationships matter more to students’ academic and personal outcomes than many other things that colleges do.

After How College Works came out, Mr. Weinberg read it, asked a group of Denison professors to do the same, and invited his mentor to visit campus for a couple of days to share his insights with faculty and staff.

Mr. Chambliss translated his findings into some advice for the new president. It’s tempting, he said, to focus on initiatives and the strategic plan. Prioritize relationships instead. That tip, Mr. Weinberg says, has “changed everything for me.”

Mentors need not spend a lot of time with students. But they do need to be available at pivotal moments. For many Denison freshmen, one of those moments comes midway through their first semester.

The experience of taking midterms and getting back their first significant grades can change students’ academic plans or even the way they see themselves. It can be a lot to process.

That’s what a dozen of Mr. Davis’s freshmen advisees were up against as they met over boxed lunches from Panera on a Tuesday in October. They were taking Mr. Davis’s “advising circle,” a one-credit, pass/fail class for freshmen taught by their academic adviser. The class — essentially homeroom for college — is meant to help new students acclimate to the university. It’s also supposed to help them connect with a professor early in their college career. Ideally, it signals professors’ openness to serving as mentors.

The advising circles are an example of Denison’s effort to use structural and cultural forces to increase the odds that students find mentors. Mentorship is also being woven into Denison’s residence-life and career-development offices and its athletics program.

Mr. Weinberg is talking up the power of mentorship with just about anyone who’ll listen. And the president builds as many of his own connections as he can. He schedules his meetings with students in the student union and with professors at the local coffee shop because that way he is more likely to bump into people he’d never see otherwise. “And that,” he says, “would be another way for me to build relationships on campus.”

As Mr. Davis’s students sat in a circle, they talked about their weeks. Some of them looked like they hadn’t slept much the night before.

John Stauffer, a lanky swimmer, had grades on his mind. His 94 on a test in health, exercise, and sport studies was good, but an 83 in ethics wasn’t as high as he’d wanted. The whole class, and Mr. Davis, was listening. But Mr. Stauffer turned to face Rachel Reardon as he spoke.

Ms. Reardon was the circle’s peer adviser, an upperclassman who had taken one of Mr. Davis’s introductory courses and was chosen by him for the paid role. The previous week, the personable junior had tried to set the students’ expectations about grades. While a B might not have been a good grade at their high schools or at the colleges some of their hometown friends attend, she told them, it was nothing to be ashamed of at Denison.

Her message had clearly landed with Mr. Stauffer. He told the group about his ethics professor, whose comments on his work had reminded him of what Ms. Reardon had said. His professor had liked his essay. “It just wasn’t, like, exceptional,” Mr. Stauffer said. “I just have to keep it in perspective.”

Another important moment came at the start of the semester. In one of the circle’s first meetings, Ms. Reardon advised the freshmen about how to handle their workload in college. She had suggested that they not read everything their professors assigned. Be strategic about it, she told them. Before sharing this tip, she asked Mr. Davis to cover his ears. It was an instructive bit of banter, acknowledging Mr. Davis as a professor who probably has a different perspective on study habits, while also letting him in on the joke.

This kind of exchange between Ms. Reardon and Mr. Davis can remind students in the advising circle that their professor is a person. And it offers the freshmen a template of what it can look like to connect with Mr. Davis — or any faculty member.

Some students make it all the way through college without developing the mentality about learning and grades that Mr. Stauffer and his classmates were developing in their first semester. Ms. Reardon’s influence appears to have helped. That didn’t require her to become best friends with students in the circle, or spend tons of time with them — just to offer a bit of trustworthy guidance at the right time.

Some challenges — like the first wave of big exams — affect lots of students at the same time. Other problems strike them as individuals. A good guide tries to anticipate those, too.

Throughout the fall semester, Matt Kretchmar, an associate professor of math and computer science, paid extra attention to one of the members of his advising circle. Alec Harrison, who grew up nearby, is the rare Denison student who commutes from off campus. That, Mr. Kretchmar knew, risked making his connection to the university more tenuous.

Mr. Harrison had a bumpy transition to college. Outside forces pulled him away from campus. Regular contact with his high-school friends, many of whom attend other colleges close by, made it more difficult to leave his home behind and create a new one at Denison, Mr. Kretchmar observed.

On top of that, Mr. Harrison didn’t have a roommate. He worked some 30 hours a week at a Giant Eagle supermarket and probably missed a lot of the social activity meant to connect students to the campus. “I was the person that he wouldn’t have had otherwise,” Mr. Kretchmar says.

Mr. Kretchmar is an experienced faculty adviser, so he might have noticed Mr. Harrison even if he hadn’t had him in class once a week. Still, the structure of the advising circle provided a noninvasive way to stay in touch. Mr. Kretchmar has helped him a lot, Mr. Harrison says. “My first few days I was pretty distraught. I went to him and he let me vent.”

The professor tried to communicate that he would support Mr. Harrison no matter what. “You have, like, one chance,” he says, “to make that clear.” Over the years, he has learned not to push too hard.

Mr. Kretchmar served a stint as Denison’s dean of first-year students, so he’s had lots of conversations with students struggling to determine if Denison was the best place for them to be. He was also charged with improving retention. Yet if he put the university’s needs ahead of students’, Mr. Kretchmar realized, they would close him off. He would miss the chance to connect with students more deeply — and those connections were the very thing that could help him keep them enrolled.

The professor has continued to listen as Mr. Harrison sorts out whether he wants to stay at Denison or transfer. The student is interested in math education, and thinks it might make more sense to pursue that major at a regional campus of Ohio State University.

As a representative of Denison, Mr. Kretchmar wants Mr. Harrison to stay. But he knows that the university isn’t the right place for everyone, and feels that being Mr. Harrison’s adviser is a more important role than being Denison’s agent. Even if Mr. Harrison transfers, Mr. Kretchmar hopes he’ll walk away knowing that people at Denison cared about him.

Mr. Harrison seems to feel it. “It wasn’t like he was pressuring me on what to do,” the student says. “He was going to be there for me either way.”

Mr. Kretchmar might not get years to develop a mentoring relationship with Mr. Harrison, especially if he does decide to transfer. Still, Mr. Kretchmar’s attitude toward the student echoes the way mentorship is described in Gallup’s survey, even in Mr. Kretchmar’s willingness to let Mr. Harrison walk away.

Denison is banking on the power of relationships — how they drive success and are among a college’s most enduring byproducts. But the university’s experiment also shows how chancy mentoring can be. A professor might end up helping shape a student’s way of seeing the world. An upperclassman might give freshmen the piece of encouragement that gets them through a challenging moment. Or, as is the case for most college students, such mentoring may never occur.

A college can create conditions that make relationships more likely to form. It can provide opportunities for students and potential mentors to interact, and it can emphasize the importance of such connections. But it can’t control — or even predict — how a relationship between a mentor and student will unfold from there. Ultimately, that’s up to them.