Undergraduate career mentoring: Social mobility panacea or ethical dilemma?

Lyden, T. (2026). Undergraduate career mentoring: Social mobility panacea or ethical dilemma? International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMCE-12-2024-0135

By Jean Rhodes

Most people working in higher education mentoring operate from a simple premise. Connecting undergraduates with employers and professionals helps them navigate a labor market and build social capital. It is hard to argue with that logic on its face. Yet a new study by Tania Lyden (2026), published in the International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education raises interesting questino.

The study draws on Lyden’s decade-long program of research examining career mentoring outcomes in a UK higher education context, using a mixed-methods design that combines surveys of mentoring program participants with in-depth qualitative interviews (Lyden, 2026). The theoretical framework is notably different from what most mentoring researchers bring to this question. Rather than relying on a relational model of mentoring or a straightforward social capital account, Lyden sets Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction in direct tension with Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy. Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” refers to the internalized set of dispositions, expectations, and orientations that people develop through their lived experiences. It helps explain why career aspirations are not simply a matter of information or access, and why connecting a working-class student with a successful professional mentor could be fraught (Bourdieu, 1984). Bandura’s concept of self-efficacy, by contrast, offers an account of how individuals build belief in their own capacity through mastery experiences and social modeling, which is what most career mentoring programs aim to do (Bandura, 1977). The question the study pursues is whether mentoring can generate enough self-efficacy to loosen the grip of habitus, and under what conditions it tries to do so without fully reckoning with the consequences.

The quantitative findings are genuinely encouraging in one respect.  Low-SES mentees gained more than their high-SES peers in self-belief regarding their ability to secure graduate-level employment, with socioeconomic status explaining 11.5 percent of the difference in outcomes, and statistically significant  differences in career clarity gains also favored low-SES mentees (Lyden, 2026). The mentoring appeared to improve skills through work experience discussions, application and interview preparation, networking practice, and encouragement. These activities were associated with gains in self-efficacy that helped low-SES students begin to stretch beyond the career horizons their habitus had set for them.

But the qualitative findings complicate that narrative. The interviews revealed that, for many low-SES mentees, partial identification with their mentors produced feelings of inauthenticity and unease that constrained how fully they could internalize the aspirations on offer (Lyden, 2026). Bourdieu’s concept of “hysteresis” describes the disorientation that arises when a person’s habitus does not match the field they are entering. His related concept of habitus clivé, or a split habitus, describes the chronic feeling that one doesn’t quite belong. Stretching mentees toward aspirational career identities sometimes sets in motion this kind of internal strife, and programs should be aware of these dynamics so they can offer meaningful support (Lyden, 2026). The study also found that, for high-SES mentees, mentoring reinforced and extended their already-existing cultural capital and professional networks.

This paper belongs in a broader conversation that the mentoring field in higher education has been slow to have. Research on first-generation college students has established fairly consistently that access to high-capital mentors is associated with meaningful support for college navigation and career development (Fruiht & Chan, 2018; Schwartz et al., 2012). What is less well understood is the affective and identity-related processes for students who must, in effect, become fluent in a world that they might feel was not built for them while managing the relational consequences back home. The social mobility literature has documented these costs, including the sense of being watched and assessed and the guilt of distance, but the mentoring literature has not generally incorporated this work into how it thinks about program design or evaluation (Reay et al., 2009; Lehmann, 2014).

Program managers should attend to these societal and structural forces as well as interpersonal and individual dynamics and potential personal costs. They should train mentors explicitly in how to build mentee self-efficacy and they should consider creating peer support structures for socially mobile students that allow them to gain access to new professional worlds without losing connection to where they came from, what Lyden (2026) describes as a potential virtuous circle in which today’s mentees become tomorrow’s mentors, building the very bridges the programs are trying to create.