Making College “Worth It” – Season 1, Episode 2

In a 2021 survey conducted by the Elon University Poll and the Center for Engaged Learning, 54.5% of recent college graduates indicated that they’d encountered meaningful relationships with faculty or staff multiple times, and 69.1% reported multiple meaningful relationships with other students. Unfortunately, 16.4% reported never developing those relationships with faculty or staff, and 9.8% never developed meaningful relationships with peers. How can students make connections in college?

Our panelists – Isis Artze-Vega (Valencia College), Oscar R. Miranda Tapia (North Carolina State University), and Peter Felten (Elon University) – share strategies from their new book (with Leo Lambert), Connections are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education. Read the book for free on Project Muse, thanks to a grant from the Gardner Institute. Explore teaching and faculty development resources related to the book on the Center’s website.

View a transcript of this episode.

Meet our Guests

Our guests are the authors (with Leo Lambert) of Connections are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education.

Headshot of Isis Artze-Vega

Isis Artze-Vega is the college provost and vice president for academic affairs at Valencia College. She is a coauthor of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching.

Headshot of Oscar R. Miranda Tapia

Oscar R. Miranda Tapia is pursuing his doctoral degree in Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at North Carolina State University.

Headshot of Peter Felten

Peter Felten is the executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, the assistant provost for teaching and learning, and a professor of history at Elon University.

Episode Credits

This episode is co-hosted by Jessie L. Moore, Director of Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning, and Sydni Brown, a senior at Elon University who is majoring in Communications Design and Strategic Communications. Making College “Worth It” is produced by Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning.

Episode art was created by Jennie Goforth, managing editor for the Center for Engaged Learning, and Nolan Schultheis, the Center’s undergraduate Podcast Producer.

Funky Percussions is by Denys Kyshchuk (@audiocoffeemusic) – https://www.audiocoffee.net/. Soft Beat is by ComaStudio.

Learn More about Research Featured in this Episode

Research Featured in the Featured Books

Review research details for Connections are Everything.

Review research details for Relationship-Rich Education.

Center Resources about Relationships

Image of Relationship-Rich Mentoring Map, illustrating the importance of supportive context and other meaningful relationships to foster mentoring relationships. Text overlay reads, "Mentoring Matters: Defining Mentoring Relationships."

Mapping Mentoring Relationships and Constellations

As we explored in a previous post, if we take mentoring relationships seriously, as recent mentoring scholarship compels us to, our orientation shifts. It calls on us to understand mentors and mentoring – those sets of meaningful relationships – within…

Three people sit at a table, talking while looking over documents by a computer. An overlay reads, "Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. Mentoring Matters. Defining Mentoring Relationships."

Taking (Mentoring) Relationships Seriously

As we have earlier explored, recent mentoring scholarship argues that our definitions of mentoring should move away from role-based orientations towards a relational-orientation that defines mentoring “in terms of the character and quality of the relationship and in terms of…

Three people sit at a table, talking while looking over documents by a computer. An overlay reads, "Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. Mentoring Matters. Defining Mentoring Relationships."

Defining Mentoring: Towards Mentoring Constellations

As scholarship on mentoring moved away from roles and actions towards processes and relationship development, definitions of mentoring have developed greater commonality not only around a shared focus on relationships, but also a shared focus on the general functions and…

Three people sit at a table, talking while looking over documents by a computer. An overlay reads, "Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. Mentoring Matters. Defining Mentoring Relationships."

Defining Mentoring and/as Mentoring Relationships

If mentoring matters, what is meant by mentoring, and what does high-quality mentoring entail? Despite over four decades of research on mentoring, there is no universally accepted definition (Mullen and Klimaitis 2021). Ubiquitous use of the term has not only…

Center Resources about Relationship Accelerators

Capstone Experiences

Definition Capstone experiences aim to facilitate students’ sense-making of their growth and development across their major or general educational studies and have been a hallmark of undergraduate education in one form or another for at least as long as higher education has…

High Impact Practices and Historically Underrepresented Minority Students

For over a decade Kuh’s (2008) work on the critical importance of engaged learning has shaped the undergraduate college and university experience. Kuh dubbed these teaching and learning experiences High Impact Practices, and taking part in at least one of them at…

Immersive Learning

Definition Immersive learning is more than a single pedagogy or specific practice. It covers a wide range of approaches to teaching and learning, and isn’t specifically attached to a specific discipline, course of study, or eventual profession. It is, rather,…

Internships

Definition Two commonly cited definitions of internships are those from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) and the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS).  Since the term “internship” lacks a consistent definition across the…

Learning Communities

Definition Learning communities emphasize collaborative partnerships between students, faculty, and staff, and attempt to restructure the university curriculum to address structural barriers to educational excellence. In their 1990 publication Learning Communities: Creating Connections Among Students, Faculty, and Disciplines, Faith Gabelnick, Jean MacGregor, Roberta S….

Service-Learning

Definition Service-learning was one of the ten experiences listed as a high-impact practice (HIP) when such practices were first identified by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) in 2007. Given the many benefits that service-learning experiences offer students…

Students as Partners

Definition Students as Partners in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, or simply Students as Partners (SaP), is a pedagogical approach that has been embraced recently by many higher education institutions primarily in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia….

Supporting Neurodiverse and Physically Disabled Students in Engaged Learning

by Caroline J. Ketcham Welcome, here is what you can expect: This page will share dialogue about resources around access, inclusion, and supports for neurodivergent and physically disabled students in higher education settings. It is the beginning of a conversation…

Undergraduate Research

Definition The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) defines undergraduate research as: “An inquiry or investigation conducted by an undergraduate student that makes an original intellectual or creative contribution to the discipline.” Similarly, Kinkead (2003) notes that Undergraduate Research (UR) can…

Work-Integrated Learning

Definition Work-integrated learning (WIL) is an approach to education that allows students to obtain work experiences related to what they are learning in a classroom setting (International Journal of Work-Integrated Learning, n.d; Jackson 2016). Ferns, Campbell, and Zegwaard (2014) describe…