The Effects of Student Coaching in College: An Evaluation of a Randomized Experiment...

"InsideTrack is an independent provider of coaching services that incorporates a combination of methodologies, curricula, and technologies. InsideTrack matches students to potential coaches, and these coaches regularly contact their students to provide help and support as they are starting a semester of study and as they continue through their first year in school. Specifically, the coaches focus significant time assessing the student’s life outside of school, which InsideTrack has found to be the leading influencer on student persistence and completion. Topics such as personal time commitments (work scheduling), primary care-giving responsibilities, and financial obligations are common during a student-coach interaction." (Abstractor: Author)

Full Publication Title: The Effects of Student Coaching in College: An Evaluation of a Randomized Experiment in Student Mentoring

"While coaching was taking place during the first year, coached students were about 5 percentage points more likely to persist in college. This represents a 9 to 12 percent increase in retention. The effect of coaching on persistence does not disappear after the treatment. Coached students were 3-4 percentage points more likely to persist after 18 months and 24 months. These represented roughly a 15 percent increase in college retention among our sample. For the three campuses for which there was degree completion data, it was found that coached students had graduation rates four percentage points higher than uncoached students after four years. When comparing the costs and benefits of student coaching to programs that target financial aid, it was found that student coaching leads to larger effects than financial aid and are much less costly to implement. The persistence of the effects after the treatment period and impact on completion only increases the cost effectiveness." (p. 20) "Recommendation for future programs evaluation would be to know if there are specific characteristics of the college coaches which increase their efficacy. It is also not known which of the specific types of coaching services and the specific actions of coaches which are most effective in motivating students." (p. 21) (Abstractor: Author and Website Staff)

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2011
• Author(s): Bettinger, Dr. Eric P.; Baker, Rachel
• Organizational Author(s): Stanford University School of Education
• Funding Source: Funding source not identified
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
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• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies