A college mentoring program aimed at getting low-income and first-generation students into and through college has proven to be effective in an area where other interventions have failed: college persistence.

That’s according to a new randomized control trial released in October, which found that students who participated in the program Bottom Linewere 14 percentage points more likely to still be enrolled in a four-year institution two years after high school than their peers who didn’t receive this support.

The most surprising thing relative to the research landscape is that the effects grow so much over time,” said Andrew Barr, assistant professor of economics at Texas A&M University and co-author of the study. “These effects are very consistent across different types of students … our results really suggested [Bottom Line] should scale well.”

College advising and mentoring programs to help at-risk students have grown more popular over the years, with their roots dating back to the late 1960s and ’70s. Bottom Line is one of 383 similar organizations that make up the National College Access Network, which serve about 2 million students. But despite the reach and history of these programs, Barr and study co-author Benjamin Castleman of the University of Virginia write that more research is needed to show how these programs help students over time.

Read the full article by Kate Stringer about mentoring programs from The 74