Let me talk briefly about the economics of in kind payments as compensation versus cash payments as compensation. On the one hand, if cash is scarce and the in kind form of payment is comparatively abundant, then it is cheaper to use the in kind payment. So, for example, one of my students from last fall wrote in her extra credit project that at many restaurants a particular job perq is “free meals” for staff. Likewise, the airlines tend to compensate (for example when looking for volunteers to take a later flight in an overbooking situation) by giving travel vouchers good for future flights.
On the other hand, students should receive course credit from a substantive educational activity, but not for work where there is little if any learning for them. For such work, students really should be paid in cash. Paying them with course credit in this case amounts to depreciating the value of the credit. That may not be noticeable if done rarely. But if done in the large it will ultimately depreciate the value of the degree. This line of thought implies a need to get some measure of the educational value for being a mentor. That is part and parcel of the project.
Turning to the demand side, there are two ways to think of course credit as compensation. One is most relevant for students who have a substantial number of free electives available for their major, some of which might be filled by getting course credit for peer mentoring. Considered this way, with enough such credit a student might be able to graduate a semester earlier. This would mean a semester less of tuition and a semester more of alternative paid work which is not available to a full time student. This is where the in kind form of compensation translates into cash. The translation is lumpy, however. One course of credit this way likely won’t speed up graduation. Several might.
The other way to consider compensation for mentoring is as a credential to be added to the student’s resume. This credential value should be present irrespective of whether the student is paid with course credit or with cash. It is doing the activity that matters, as long as it can be verified that the mentor performed the mentoring duties in a satisfactory matter. (Here course credit might be better than cash, because if the mentoring were unsatisfactory the student wouldn’t get the course credit.) At issue then is how valuable the mentoring credential proves to be.
I don’t have any direct knowledge of this now. But I do have a recollection of when I used peer tutors in teaching intermediate microeconomics back in the late 1990s. Several of my mentors told me they talked about the mentoring in job interviews and it helped them with job placement. The people interviewing them were apparently impressed that they had this experience. (Back then, most of the mentoring was via online office hours. It was pretty early in the development of the Internet for doing such things. So there was a novelty factor at play.) One might expect that such mentoring would still be perceived as valuable, even if the technology use is completely ordinary, because mentoring suggests a certain type of people skill and somebody who can mentor well likely would be good at interacting with customers or be a good manager.
My early thinking on the course credit or cash alternative is that first time mentors probably learn quite a lot from the activity so it is worthy of course credit, while those who are doing for a second time or beyond may not learn quite as much. The more experienced mentors, then, probably should be paid. Cash is very scarce on campus now, as we are facing pending very large budget cuts. If everything else here makes sense the implication is to limit mentoring multiple times or find some new revenue source that can enable it. I’d much rather that the latter happens, but how to identify donors for the activity is not something I can speak to, though I did write about something similar on my blog many years ago.