Generation Z Students Want Young Mentors, Hungarian University Survey Finds

Generation Z university students are breaking one of the oldest rules in the mentoring playbook: instead of seeking out older, more experienced figures as the classical literature prescribes, they overwhelmingly prefer mentors closer to their own age. That is the headline finding of a new study from Széchenyi István University in Győr, Hungary, which surveyed 117 students in its International Relations BA program about how the institution's existing faculty–student mentoring system meets, or fails to meet, the expectations of the most digitally native, globally connected cohort of students yet to pass through university lecture halls. The research, published in Discover Global Society, combined a systematic review of the recent mentoring literature with an empirical questionnaire and compared students enrolled in Hungarian-language programs with international students studying in English.

The study's context is a cohort whose defining traits have been catalogued extensively in the research literature: digital confidence from birth, global cultural outlook, social media-shaped relationship management, mobility across residences and careers, and a strong preference for visual, image-based information. Generation Z students, generally defined as those born between the mid-1990s and the late 2000s, are also the most formally educated generation to date, and they carry a heightened awareness of mental health alongside documented vulnerability to anxiety and depression. Their formative years were shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, which intensified experiences of uncertainty and social isolation and reinforced their demand for emotional support, clear guidance, and stable reference figures.

Crucially for educators, this is a generation that grew up receiving instant, visible feedback online, and it now expects the same continuous feedback loop in educational and professional settings, including performance evaluations ideally conducted weekly with room to discuss future plans. The researchers grounded their empirical work in a systematic literature review. A preliminary exploration of the Scopus database showed how broad the field has become: a search for the term 'mentoring' between 2019 and 2024 returned 15,076 records, which the authors visualized with VOSviewer and sorted into five thematic clusters covering higher education, primary and secondary education combined with the corporate sector, healthcare, counselling, and social mentoring and wellbeing.

For the formal review, the team used the SPIDER tool (Sample, Phenomenon of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research type) to construct a Boolean search combining Generation Z terms with mentoring-related and student-related keywords. From 36 retrieved records, screening against inclusion criteria—English-language, peer-reviewed articles published between 2015 and 2025 focused on mentoring in higher education with Generation Z as the primary population—yielded 21 studies for synthesis. Those 21 studies clustered into four thematic directions.

The largest group examined healthcare education and clinical practice, from adapting medical education to Gen Z learning preferences to structured mentorship in neurosurgery and peer mentoring for psychomotor skills. A second group addressed career planning, work values, and professional guidance. A third focused on educational methods, including digitally oriented and experiential approaches.

The fourth emphasized structured and technology-enhanced mentoring models, with one study of engineering students describing a multi-stage process running from induction through alumni mentorship that was associated with enhanced academic performance and co-curricular engagement, and another concluding that Generation Z traits influence mentoring needs more strongly than cultural norms, making tailored e-mentoring particularly effective. A recurring observation across the review was that mentoring is almost never treated as a stand-alone pedagogical phenomenon; it is embedded in disciplinary or social contexts that shape its design and outcomes, which is precisely why the Hungarian team chose the intercultural environment of an internationally oriented degree program as its setting. The empirical component examined the faculty–student mentoring system introduced at Széchenyi István University in September 2019 as part of an institutional effort to reduce dropout.

Its core purpose is to give first-year undergraduates guidance in academic, administrative, and study-methodology matters, and within the International Relations BA program the system extends across all three years of study, with one faculty mentor assigned to Hungarian-language students and another to international students in the English-language track. Data were collected via an online questionnaire distributed in Hungarian and English between 13 April and 13 May 2025 to 179 students and recent graduates; 117 completed it, a response rate of 65.4 percent. The 31-item instrument covered awareness of the mentoring system, trust and accessibility, attitudes toward personalization and communication, ranked support needs, and perceived effectiveness of various mentoring activities, analyzed with descriptive statistics and inferential tests in IBM SPSS Statistics version 25.

Awareness of the system was high but uneven. Overall, 108 of 117 respondents, or 92.3 percent, knew they had an assigned mentor, and 86.3 percent knew who that mentor was, a striking figure given that students receive multiple emails from their mentors and that a dedicated first-semester course explicitly highlights the mentoring system. A Chi-square test of independence found a statistically significant association between language of instruction and awareness (χ2(1) = 6.045, p = 0.014): students in the English-language program were unaware of having a mentor in 15.2 percent of cases, compared with just 2.8 percent of Hungarian-language students.

Study mode showed no significant association, and awareness did not vary by semester (χ2(6, N = 117) = 1.254, p = 0.974), suggesting the gap reflects how information about mentoring reaches international students rather than when in their studies it reaches them. Trust told a similar story of divergence. On a five-point scale, 83.7 percent of all respondents rated their confidence in approaching their mentor at level 4 or 5, but an independent samples t test, interpreted with unequal variances after a significant Levene's test (F = 32.982, p < 0.001), showed Hungarian-language students reporting a substantially higher mean trust score (M = 4.76, SD = 0.572) than their English-language peers (M = 3.87, SD = 1.240), a difference that was statistically significant (t(57.57) = −4.568, p < 0.001).

The authors attribute the gap to possible language barriers, unfamiliarity with the Hungarian higher education system, and cultural differences in perceptions of authority and help-seeking behaviour. Descriptively, trust also grew over time, rising from a mean of 3.99 among first-year students to 4.70 in the second year, although this pattern did not reach statistical significance. The survey's most provocative result concerns mentor age.

Among Likert-scale statements, the strongest agreement went to 'It is positive that mentors are younger colleagues' (M = 4.26, SD = 0.993), directly contradicting the classical literature, which emphasizes that a mentor should be an older, more experienced figure. Students also agreed that mentors provide individualized support beyond general information-sharing (M = 4.20) and that communication with mentors is more direct than with other administrative channels (M = 4.17). A smaller age gap, the data suggest, lowers hierarchical barriers and encourages openness, and the lowest-rated statements—'Mentoring should be even more personalized' (M = 2.90) and 'There were cases when mentors could not help me' (M = 1.68)—indicate students were broadly satisfied with current personalization levels and mentor effectiveness.

When asked to rank five potential areas of support, students placed administrative assistance first, followed by psychological and emotional support and help with goals and career or continuing-education decisions, while scientific and subject-specific knowledge transfer ranked lowest. Cultural differences emerged within this ordering: international students prioritized psychological support second, whereas Hungarian students placed career guidance there. Across subgroups, however, a striking contradiction surfaced around emotional support.

Although psychological and emotional support ranked among the most needed forms of help, only 55 students—47.0 percent—reported using it, and it consistently received the lowest satisfaction scores in every subgroup examined. The authors suggest this mismatch may reflect the institutional role of faculty mentors, who are not trained psychologists and whose system was designed primarily for academic, administrative, and career-related guidance; students may simply not view them as a primary source of psychological support. Average satisfaction was 3.9 in the Hungarian-language program but only 2.9 in the English-language program and 2.66 among part-time students.

Notably, 98.3 percent of respondents considered mentoring activities necessary overall, and 62 left open-ended comments expressing satisfaction, with one writing that 'the mentors try their very best to support our studies.' Constructive suggestions focused on more frequent interaction—some proposing two to three information sessions per semester—better information flow, expanded career guidance linked to internships and employer connections, and stronger visibility of emotional support services. The authors conclude that mentoring systems need to be redefined around Generation Z's preference for continuous, transparent, informal, and individualized support, treating university onboarding much like organizational onboarding that fosters belonging and retention. They also caution that the findings come with limitations: the study covered a single program at one university, the sample consisted exclusively of Generation Z students so the identified preferences cannot be interpreted as generational traits without comparison data from other cohorts, and the researchers call for future work using more detailed background variables such as nationality, previous educational experience, and length of stay in the host country.

Subject of Research: Generation Z mentoring expectations in a multicultural higher education mentoring system in Hungary

Article Title: Mentoring practices for generation Z in higher education in a multicultural environment

Article References: Szőke, J., Pálffy, Z., & Ködmön, Z. (2026). Mentoring practices for generation Z in higher education in a multicultural environment. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 282. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00629-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00629-7

Keywords: Generation Z, mentoring, higher education, international students, multicultural education, Hungary, student retention, psychological support, career guidance, systematic literature review, faculty mentor, trust