Journal of Emerging Scholarship

Self-confidence and belief in one’s abilities play a vital role in academic success. These factors may be particularly important for community college students, who often face higher barriers than their peers at 4-year institutions. Mentorship is thought to strongly influence self-confidence, but little is known about the relationship between mentorship and the beliefs of community college students. This study investigates how mentorship influences community college students’ self-confidence, using data from a novel survey administered to more than 400 Anne Arundel Community College students in the fall of 2024. The survey collected data on student demographics, mentor-mentee dynamics, and students’ own perceptions of their employment outcomes relative to their peers. We use multivariate regression models to evaluate the relationship between mentorship and student beliefs while controlling for a host of potentially confounding variables, and show that the number of mentors a student has positively correlates with their self-confidence. We find this positive association is primarily driven by female participants, which we take as suggestive evidence that the mentorship channel is particularly important for female students, consistent with prior research on the gender “confidence gap.” Our results inform educators, administrators, and policy-makers about the positive impact mentorship can have on community college student self-confidence at the secondary education level.