Student peer leaders are the fuel that keeps campuses running. A new book offers a look at how to increase their efficiency and output.
Interview by James A. Baumann
On any given day on any given campus, a resident assistant is hosting a hall meeting, an orientation leader is conducting an ice-breaker exercise, a tutor is reviewing another student’s essay, an admissions guide is pointing out campus landmarks while walking backward, a senior student is showing a first-year the ropes, someone is hyping that weekend’s big event, and an untold number of other students are making the time to take on an untold number of other duties and tasks. Individually, they may fly under the radar. Collectively, the campuses couldn’t operate without them.
The vital role of peer leader students is among the worst-kept secrets in higher education. In their upcoming book, Toward Peer Leadership as a High-Impact Practice, editors Bryce Bunting and Dallin George Young, along with their contributing authors, set out to capture the value these students bring to their campuses. More importantly, though, they also attempt to illustrate ways to maximize those roles and responsibilities and create what they call a “triple impact,” meaning that peer leaders benefit not only the institution but also the student recipients and the peer leaders themselves.
The book, scheduled to be published in February 2025 by the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition at the University of South Carolina, leverages the results of a 2023 survey of peer leaders. Administered in cooperation with ACUHO-I, NODA, NACADA, NACA, and the International Center for Supplemental Instruction, the survey draws on responses from more than 1,500 peer leaders across the United States and examines whether or not peer leadership can indeed be considered a high-impact practice, reviews the trends and issues related to the peer leadership experience, and determines if students from historically marginalized populations experience outcomes similar to those of more privileged students.
The two editors, Bunting (associate professor, assistant dean, and director of the Office of First-Year Experience at Brigham Young University) and Young (assistant professor at the University of Georgia), drew on subject-matter experts and additional data sources from the participating associations. Together, they look at the trends in demographics, responsibilities, compensation, and other nuts and bolts issues, as well as connections to desired outcomes such as improving students’ sense of belonging, skill development, communication, and more. The combination of an over-arching view of peer leadership and additional position-specific analysis provides valuable insight into these roles that, while they may not literally keep the lights on, certainly shine bright on the student experience.
The Talking Stick spoke with Bunting and Young as well as Tori Negash, ACUHO-I’s research director, who authored the chapter on resident assistants. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
After you have reviewed your survey results, all your research, and all your work, who is the typical peer leader on a college campus?
Bryce Bunting: Well, one of the things we tried to acknowledge in the report and other places is that our sample – that is, the students who responded to our survey – is not fully representative of the United States population of college and university students or peer leaders more specifically. That said, one of the things we saw pretty quickly was that those who responded tended to be female, and they tended to be white. We were a little closer to the general population in terms of first-gen status and Pell eligibility, but even then I think our sample was not quite as representative in those ways as we would have hoped.
Demographics aside, we also noticed that students who seek out these positions tend to want to give back to their peers and their campus. They tend to want to give back both on an institutional level and on a more individual level. They want to help their peers navigate this college experience in helpful, productive ways.
Tori Negash: I wrote down a few things about resident assistants (RAs). More than 25% were first-generation college students. About 30% were Pell-eligible. Those two things stand out to me as possibly explaining some of their motivations. One of their top motivators was earning an income while studying. Also, about one in three were non-white, which was maybe more diverse than I expected. I wasn't sure what to expect because you never know who's going to respond to a survey. But I felt that there was a pretty diverse set of RAs represented, and I think that's a positive thing. I'm curious if we could look at a broader sample to see if that would be true overall for the United States. Are RAs, in general, more diverse than their campuses?
Dallin George Young: There's a really good case to be made for the idea that peer leaders, in general, are high-achieving students. Some of this is by design. There's usually some minimum grade point average we ask our students to have to be an RA or whatever because housing departments don't want to be known on campus as the places where we send students to become over-involved, which can negatively influence their educational experience. Even for a peer advisor, we're probably looking for students who have demonstrated that they've had a successful go at things. Generally, the wisdom is that you want somebody who has been somewhat successful in that space. Maybe there's even a selection effect; if they got a C in calculus, do they feel like they could actually be a tutor in a calculus class?
I also think that the U.S. data, in particular, compared to the rest of the world, show that students who are peer leaders in the U.S. are far more engaged than their counterparts in terms of the number of positions they hold and the number of hours per week they work. Bryce, you might know this off the top of your head better than I do. Something like 8% of the students in our sample, the overall sample, are working more than 40 hours a week or something crazy like that. Or maybe it's more than 20 hours a week.
Bunting: I remember it was a higher percentage than I expected.
Young: But these are very, very engaged students, and there's probably a case to be made that many of them are over-engaged. The RA data show that a number of them held more than just the RA position. I think half of them only had one role, but about 25% of them served in more than two, and 15% served in three.
Bunting: If we're looking at working more than 20 hours a week in a peer leader role, it was about 11% or 12% who responded “yes.” Looking at more than 40 hours, it was less than 1%. So there are a number of students working in peer leader roles that approach a full-time job.
Along with thinking about the so-called typical peer leader, how would you define the typical peer leadership position? Not necessarily the specifics of the job (obviously, there are differences between the responsibilities of an orientation leader versus an RA), but what would you say are those general traits that go into a peer leadership position?
Negash: Are you asking what they should get out of it?
I am thinking about what some of the typical expectations or elements are that one would see in a peer leadership position.
Young: Right off the top of my head, I think there are things that any given functional area might expect a peer leader to provide. Some of them may be the crass process-oriented kinds of things that we need people to do. You mentioned orientation leaders. We need people to be able to staff the check-in desk. We need people to guide visitors from station to station at orientation. We need people to answer questions. Same thing with RAs. We need people to provide whatever is included in their role on any given campus. There's probably some sort of educational programming. There's probably some crisis response. There's probably some peer or meta- or para-counseling.
But cutting across all of them, what the institutions and programs recognize is that peer leaders are usually people who, like Bryce said, want to give back. They want to contribute to the overall educational enterprise. They might be motivated by a paycheck, but there are probably other ways to earn one on campus other than being a peer leader. There's probably some connection that they want to make with people. There's some feeling of being a member of the team. They want to be a member of the RA team because they had a positive experience when they were a student living in the halls, or maybe they had a bad experience and want to make sure that somebody else has a positive one. They also want to be in roles where they have some authority given to them by the institution to act in the institution's name, contribute, and feel that sense of membership, connection, and belonging.
Negash: I'm thinking back to when I worked in the academic resource center world. Obviously, that was more specialized because we were looking for tutors for peer support and supplemental instruction. Some specialized knowledge was required, as well as other requirements in terms of GPA and academic record. Maybe it’s a vague answer, but leadership qualities are part of these roles because they often have to be able to give direction and make difficult decisions or have difficult conversations. I'm thinking of an RA specifically here. Part of that, I think, is a skill, but part of it could be learned, and they're going to receive training before they step into it. And they should be receiving ongoing supervision for that too, but some of those things you must have the aptitude for, or you won't be successful.
Bunting: Cutting across functional areas – from both the institutional perspective and in terms of what the peer leader is hoping for – there's a social-relational aspect to what they do. I can't imagine a peer leader seeking out a role like those represented in the survey and then being put off or surprised by there being a lot of interaction with people in the role. Because of that, I think there's sometimes a tendency (maybe I'm saying this with some bias as an introvert) in some settings for extroverted students to be privileged. It's not that we shouldn't have extroverted students in those roles, but I would argue that the entire peer leader team does not need to be extroverted. In fact, I think there's an argument to be made for identifying students who bring a slightly different skill set.
As Tori pointed out, I believe deeply that nearly all the skills that a peer leader needs can be developed. Some students are going to come in further down the road developmentally in terms of some of those skills, such as reflective listening or demonstrations of empathy. Those interpersonal abilities are vital for any peer leader role.
Another pitfall that I sometimes see among peer leaders is the assumption that their role is to do a lot of talking and telling. They think they will be front and center as the experts to dispense the wisdom. I think one of the things that should be part of every peer leader role is a reminder and then some training to help them understand that their role isn't always to give the answers. Sometimes, they need to promote reflection or self-authorship or help students learn to navigate their own challenges. I think that cuts across roles, but sometimes that gets forgotten either by the peer leader or those training them.
That's a really nice segue into what I was thinking about recognizing the elements these peer leadership positions should include and expect in terms of outcomes that would classify that experience as a high-impact practice. We know someone can say a position is a high-impact practice, but we also know that, in the end, they're not all high-impact practices. They may all have the potential to be a high-impact practice, but which ones really are?
Bunting: One thing just right off the bat (and I hope that our report has raised this question even if I don't know that we've fully answered it), but for something to be considered a high-impact practice, it must have a quantitative demonstrable impact on things like retention, graduation, and persistence. That's not all we're trying to do. I'm not trying to minimize the more transformative sorts of outcomes that occur, but if we're going to consider peer leadership a high-impact practice, it has to impact peer leaders in the ways that institutions care about in terms of traditional metrics. In addition, we have to see those gains when we disaggregate the data. If only a segment of the student population has the opportunity to participate in this experience, and they're the only ones demonstrating growth in terms of those metrics, we've got some work to do.
To truly be considered a high-impact practice, peer leadership must be empirically tested, have a quantitative impact or improvement on those metrics, and show the gains across various demographic groups. That’s whether we're talking about first-gen versus continuing-gen or white students versus students of color or a whole host of other ways we can disaggregate those data. That seems essential to me.
Young: We've done enough research in higher education to know that certain attributes of educational experiences will lead to the kinds of outcomes that Bryce is talking about. I think it's easy for us to go back to the eight elements of high-impact practices that George Kuh and Ken O'Donnell outlined more than 10 years ago. And Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson basically outlined the same thing 15 years or more before that in terms of principles of quality practices in higher education. None of those should come as any surprise: like having conversations with peers and faculty about substantive matters and having good opportunities for reflection, for feedback, and for application of the knowledge. It goes back to this idea connected to what Bryce is talking about. We know that if they have what's being referred to as implementation fidelity, there are 11 high-impact practices that have been blessed in higher education. And we know that there are probably other things happening on campuses that will yield significant impacts that are not called learning communities, or experiences with diversity, or first-year experiences, or senior capstone experiences. They will yield those kinds of things because they have those high-quality elements in them. We hope peer leadership serves as an opportunity for those kinds of things to happen; when done well, they can yield these kinds of outcomes across the demographic areas that we want to make sure achieve success in higher education.
Conversely, there is nothing magical about calling something a first-year seminar that will make it automatically a high-impact practice if it lacks these things, i.e., if it doesn't have those relational aspects or those high-quality pedagogical aspects. In terms of how we will know something's a high-impact practice, it's a bit of both. It's a bit of what's demonstrable on one end and whether or not we know what is happening to make those things happen. We look at what will yield more than just these RPG (retention, persistence, and graduation) results and the kinds of things employers are saying they want from college graduates.
As I was looking through the data, this is what RAs say they're getting from these experiences. They're getting adaptability and innovative kinds of skills. And they're getting good communication skills, which is important no matter what your next step is after university study.
Tori, was there anything else in particular about the RA position you described that demonstrated its value as a high-impact practice?
Negash: One of the things was the regular feedback and supervision they receive, as well as the opportunity to reflect on the feedback and debrief. It isn’t just “Here's the feedback, go on your way.” It is an interactive process where they have the opportunity to engage in learning about the feedback and how they could improve and then applying it. That was one of the areas with the most positive feedback. Also, many of the RAs said they had regular interactions with a supervisor who gave them that feedback and engaged in that communication process. Maybe it wouldn't directly be something that's going to make them ready to work in the real world after they graduate, but it's going to help them be able to take feedback, apply it, and then make adjustments. That is definitely a skill that needs developing.
The respondents also talked about different skills that improved during their time as an RA. Leadership skills were one area where more than nine in ten said they improved their communication skills, particularly interpersonal communication, as well as skills in problem solving, decision making, project management, and critical thinking. All are things that would help them as a student, but they would also be skills that would help them in their time beyond school. They also all acknowledged that they felt like they belonged on their campus. They had a very high sense of belonging, and we know how that's associated with so many positive well-being outcomes and mental health outcomes.
When you look at the motivations the different peer leaders say they have for taking on these positions, they break down to some extent into the more practical and the less tangible ones. From what I've heard from a lot of our members, they are having a more difficult time recruiting students for these opportunities and positions. How do you think, knowing these motivations, campuses could apply these to their recruitment processes?
Negash: I wrote in the chapter that I wondered if those recruiting for these positions really know what the students’ motivations are. Do they incorporate that into the recruitment process? One recommendation is to weave these categories (helping others and their community, finances, involvement on campus, skill development, workforce development) into how they approach advertising and recruiting for these positions. Maybe it would click with students that this is the opportunity they are looking for.
Another thing I talked about is the high percentage of RA positions that are not paid in any way. I'm trying to find where I wrote down what percentage of the RAs were working in volunteer roles.
Bunting: I want to say it was around 20% or so, if I recall.
Negash: It was 27% who said it was a volunteer role, which means they didn't get room, board, stipends, scholarships, or anything for doing this. And if you imagine all that's required in being in that type of position, honestly, it feels criminal to me that you're not compensating them in some way. So that's something to figure out. In one of the sections I talk about how if a campus does not have the money in their budget to pay them, then they need to get creative. Work with financial aid and figure out a way to get creative. Make it a work-study position and look for students who qualify for work-study because then you pay about a fourth of the rate per hour that you would for a student who's not work-study-eligible.
When I thought about the language that the practitioners use in the different departments covered in the report and also the language used in the survey, I tried to imagine if those are the words that really click in a student's brain. We hear an awful lot about students saying they expect their higher education experience to draw a pretty direct line to developing skills for the job force. When they say that, they are talking about their classroom experience, but we also know that there are things happening outside the classroom that could be leveraged as well. So, to that end, do you think if we officially or unofficially use language like calling it “soft skills” or whatever, are we underselling this opportunity? How do we communicate to people that these peer leadership positions do have a direct impact on skills that they will need down the road?
Young: I think housing is in a really good position to be able to do this, especially with the movement towards residential curricula. I remember when I was a hall director at the University of South Carolina, we had what I would call an early version of a curricular approach. The reason I liked that is because we had learning outcomes that we wanted for the students who lived in the halls, but we also had the residential student leadership model. We had language around what we wanted the RAs to get out of the experience.
If I were to go back in time, I would want to use some of that language to make those connections. We know that RAs will be able to develop those communication skills and that those skills will be helpful when they enter the job market or graduate school or whatever comes next. We have some good evidence that these are the kinds of outcomes that matter to the students on their campus, so why not make sure that the curriculum extends to the student staff as well? Use that as part of the recruitment language to say, “Know what? You're going to help students develop in these ways, but you're also going to develop in these ways.” I'm confident that students are pretty savvy in terms of understanding that they have only a limited amount of time and that there are things they want to get out of the college experience.
We have to come at it from a multifaceted point of view. We know that students can’t think about what will motivate them if, for example, they can’t even afford to do it. So, yes, we need to make sure that we're compensating them in some meaningful way, and we also need to make sure we're saying that it's not just having a job. It's about making sure they are getting those skills, making those connections with peers and other staff, and are going to develop problem-solving skills. Where else are you going to be able to solve problems like an RA at 2 a.m. coming across a situation that nobody's ever seen before? There's a rooster on the balcony. What are we going to do about that?
Bunting: Amen to everything Tori and Dallin have mentioned. One thing I'll add is that there's an opportunity – maybe a missed opportunity in most cases – to partner with career services or whatever that entity is called on your campus. One way might be sitting down with those folks and explaining to them, for example, what the RA role is and then helping them think through how it maps on to what employers are saying they want. How do we help peer leaders tell that story in graduate school applications, or cover letters, or interviews? And how do we tell that story to prospective applicants for these roles in a way that's connected to the employability outcomes that we know matter, but also in a language that will mean something to them? I think those folks in career services could be key partners and players in the work we do both to demonstrate the impact of being a peer leader and to tell that story to prospective peer leaders.
Along those same lines, I wonder if there's an opportunity to engage alumni, maybe recent alums, more effectively than we do. Let’s follow up after they have graduated and ask, “Hey, you've been graduated a year. How did being an RA prepare you for what you're doing now?” If we could capture some of those stories, I think that could be really powerful. We could use short video vignettes to market this role or have panels of past RAs who come back and tell their story and respond to questions from either current or potential RAs.
Negash: I was thinking of testimonials. So that's really what you were just talking about: prior RAs discussing the impacts the role had on them, even if they're still a student but no longer an RA – and then those who have left and gone on to grad school or a job or whatever it might be. I think that would be very helpful.
I talked about career readiness in the chapter a little bit. And I pulled in some National Association of Colleges and Employers competencies. To Bryce's point about the career center on campus, I'm sure they know what these are and would be working with them. In terms of the skills that students are identifying they're gaining, it’s easy to tie them to those competencies of employability.
When I was looking at the data and the results, I started thinking about how it was presented in that necessarily formal survey language. It made me think about the student who is taking this survey. They see the list of outcomes and skills they could have developed, and they're checking boxes on the appropriate ones. But if you had given them a blank form and asked, “What did you get out of being a peer leader?” would they even know that those things happened? If you want them to be able to tell that story down the road, you need to tell them first that these things would, could, and should have happened.
Bunting: I agree. I think that's what highlights the importance of good supervision and regular reflection. I think you said it really well. We assume that when students respond to these questions, the thoughts they are expressing are already in their minds, but sometimes facilitating the reflection is what helps them make those connections. The more that supervisors and others can engage peer leaders in what might be called curated reflection, the more we can use that information to be really thoughtful about what we're asking peer leaders to reflect on in terms of employability outcomes and those sorts of things.
As an example, one thing I would love to see happen more often (and this gets at some other elements of high-impact practices) is a peer leader portfolio where the student pulls together some artifacts or engages in some reflection on how their experience maps on to specific outcomes. Those could be employability outcomes, or maybe they're institutional outcomes. That sort of process gives the institution some nice assessment data. But more importantly it engages the peer leader in some powerful reflection that prepares them to tell that story in more effective ways. Now they've got some language to use because we've asked them to articulate that learning and that growth or the particular elements of the experience that have prepared them for future roles.
With all that said, when considering this research and this report, who is it that we need to convince about the value of peer leadership opportunities? Are we talking to the students taking on these peer leadership roles? Are we talking to the students who benefit from the peer leaders carrying out these roles? Or is it an institutional approach where we need to discuss the value of this as a whole so leaders will continue to put the resources and effort behind them?
Young: Well, I might change your question a little bit. I think people recognize the value in the role and, depending on the stakeholder, the value proposition changes. At the most basic, there's an economy of scale approach where the value proposition to the department is the labor. The value proposition for the students is that research shows that when peer leaders engage with them, they get a better educational experience. And peer leaders might say it's great to be able to go to college and have their housing paid for.
I think the question isn't necessarily how to communicate the value. I think the question is how we rethink the opportunity the peer leader position presents for everybody. I would like to see this report in the hands of people who supervise peer leaders so they have a much more thoughtful approach to shaping and structuring those roles. I'd like to see this in the hands of people who make decisions about the resources that go to particular offices, especially in terms of compensating peer leaders, because if you can establish the value proposition that this is a really high-impact practice, then budgets as documents-of-priorities start to reflect those priorities. Maybe we do need to see this as an investment. Because then, when you get a better return on the student outcome, you get a better return on the program-level outcome and you get a better return on the educational experience for the students.
Negash: We have a “case for campus housing” video that we put out earlier this year with some stats and different things making the case about why housing matters. I think that, with the changes in higher education, there will be this requirement year-to-year to make the case for various programs and positions on campus, why they should exist, why they should be paid a certain level, etc.
My hope is that this will help in the RA arena to justify why the position should exist. Perhaps it could be re-imagined to give more students the opportunity to take on the role in a more specialized way. In the report I even make a case for this role on campus because I really do think the data do that. I hope it is evident that it is a benefit to the student who is an RA, a benefit to the student who's living with the RA, and a benefit to the school because there are better outcomes for the students. It's a benefit for everyone.
Bunting: If I could pick one audience for the report, it would be those who pay attention to things like achievement gaps. Peer leadership has been, for maybe the last 10, 15, or even 20 years, seen as an initiative or a program that can benefit the students being served. However, I think our data suggest that being a peer leader can be an intervention in and of itself. So if you have students you're concerned about, either because they have a low sense of belonging or are underperforming academically, consider if there are ways to identify those students earlier and then get them into this peer leader pipeline.
That experience builds their sense of belonging and community. It enhances their academic skill and ability. It helps them be more connected to key campus resources and people. Instead of just thinking about peer leadership as something we do to students who are struggling, we can invite those students into these roles. I'm not suggesting hiring people who aren't capable or qualified or competent, but I think we need to rethink how we're measuring and evaluating that. If we can get students onto this trajectory earlier, particularly segments of the student population that we're concerned about, that can make a big difference for those students individually. They can then mentor, support, and guide students with the same sorts of identities as them. Those students benefit in new ways because they have a peer leader in whom they see themselves. I want to think that institutions benefit in all sorts of ways, and this is another tool we can use to start to close those achievement gaps across demographic groups.
James A. Baumann is the Editor of Talking Stick and the ACUHO-I Publications Director.
