Institutional Mentoring, Educational Aspirations, and Social Inequality in Hungary

Educational inequality and early school leaving remain persistent challenges in stratified education systems, particularly for disadvantaged students in rural areas. Although mentoring programmes are widely promoted as compensatory interventions, relatively little is known about how institutionally embedded mentoring influences educational aspirations and trajectories within highly stratified school systems. This study examines the nationwide Hungarian Teach for Hungary mentoring programme, in which university students provide formally organised peer mentoring to disadvantaged lower secondary school students. The study adopts a triangulated mixed-methods design, integrating longitudinal administrative education data (2018–2024), pre–post survey data, and qualitative interviews. The dataset includes 25 higher education institutions, 108 partner schools, and more than 3300 mentored students, enabling an analysis of mentoring processes across diverse institutional and regional contexts. The findings suggest that mentoring is associated with more structured educational aspirations, smoother transitions to upper secondary education, and more stable patterns of school participation, particularly in disadvantaged rural settings. Rather than producing direct academic effects, mentoring appears to operate through institutional mechanisms that shape students’ access to educational information, expectations, and opportunity structures. Formal mentor preparation, ongoing supervision, and institutional coordination emerge as key conditions for sustaining high-quality mentoring relationships and supporting students’ educational orientation. The study contributes to international research on mentoring and educational inequality by conceptualizing mentoring as an institutionally mediated mechanism embedded within stratified education systems. Beyond the Hungarian context, the findings provide analytically transferable insights for education systems seeking to address persistent inequalities in educational access and transition opportunities.