Building a Culture of Mentorship: How Higher Ed Can Move from Isolated Programs to Institutional Scale
Mentorship is widely recognized as one of higher education’s most powerful high-impact practices. When executed effectively, peer and alumni mentorship directly drives identity development, academic integration, and student retention. Yet, on many campuses, mentorship remains fragmented—housed in isolated departments, tracked in disjointed spreadsheets, or restricted to specialized cohorts like Honors programs and student-athletes.
During an interactive workshop session, Jennifer Kious (Director of Marketing at Mentor Collective), Dr. Jennifer Ebinger (Assistant Provost for Experiential Learning within the Provost Division of Academic Affairs at Southern Methodist University), Olivia Prioleau (Project Specialist in the Office of Engaged Learning at Southern Methodist University) shared how higher education leaders can transition from one-off mentoring initiatives to a campus-wide culture of mentorship.
The SMU Story: Solving the "Sizzle Group" Retention Challenge
At Southern Methodist University (SMU), their peer mentorship initiative, Mustang Mentors, was created to solve a specific institutional gap: supporting students who lack an immediate, built-in campus community.
SMU refers to this demographic as the "Sizzle Group". Unlike student-athletes, Honors scholars, or members of tight-knit Greek organizations, these unaligned students often lack built-in social structures—putting them at a significantly higher risk for low sense of belonging and stop-out.
"Students involved in a specific affiliation program have a built-in community and are less likely to leave. We were looking at a group of students at risk for retention who weren't in one of those primary academic or athletic groups, and asking: how do we boost belonging and retention for them?"
— Olivia Prioleau, Southern Methodist University
The Scaling Evolution
By moving away from manual spreadsheet matching and implementing Mentor Collective's centralized infrastructure, SMU not only lifted the retention and sense of belonging for unaligned students but also unlocked campus-wide scalability:
- Administrative Lift Reduction: Centralizing matching, messaging, and data collection saved hundreds of staff hours, allowing program managers to focus on high-touch student support rather than logistics.
- Academic Department Expansion: Specialized departments across SMU—including English, Film, and Pre-Health—began bringing their existing, unstructured departmental mentoring programs under the unified Mustang Mentors technological umbrella.
6 Structural Elements of a Culture of Mentorship
Grounded in peer-reviewed research published by the University of New Mexico's Mentoring Institute, the speakers outlined six essential pillars required to elevate mentorship from an isolated project to an institutional priority:
- Strategic: Mentorship goals are explicitly linked to institutional priorities and broader student success metrics.
- Real-World Example: UNC Greensboro linked peer mentorship directly to their Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), while Indiana University embedded mentorship into their IU 2030 Strategic Plan.
- Real-World Example: UNC Greensboro linked peer mentorship directly to their Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), while Indiana University embedded mentorship into their IU 2030 Strategic Plan.
- Participant-Centered: Inclusive, identity-conscious, and accessible. Mentorship is dual-beneficial—delivering clear value to both mentor and mentee.
- Real-World Example: Lehigh University matches students across multi-dimensional identity factors rather than major alone, while Pima Community College uses virtual and text-based access to serve commuter students.
- Real-World Example: Lehigh University matches students across multi-dimensional identity factors rather than major alone, while Pima Community College uses virtual and text-based access to serve commuter students.
- Visible: Mentorship is woven into the university's brand and culture rather than treated as a side initiative.
- Real-World Example: UC Davis embeds mentorship into its student value proposition—incoming students know that being an Aggie means gaining an instant mentor network.
- Real-World Example: UC Davis embeds mentorship into its student value proposition—incoming students know that being an Aggie means gaining an instant mentor network.
- Resourced: Mentors are systematically trained, funding is sustained through operational budgets (rather than temporary grants), and staff are freed from manual administration.
- Data-Driven: Program data is easily accessible and integrated into institutional reporting so departments can evaluate impact on persistence and sense of belonging in real time.
- Real-World Example: UW-Superior distributes centralized mentoring impact reports across departments to demonstrate how peer connections support localized retention goals.
- Real-World Example: UW-Superior distributes centralized mentoring impact reports across departments to demonstrate how peer connections support localized retention goals.
- Celebrated: Mentors and mentees are recognized at every level—from graduation cords and official certificates to campus-wide celebrations.
- Real-World Example: Augusta University hosts a student-led club ("Jags for Jags") and an annual mentorship barbecue to publicly champion peer leaders.
- Real-World Example: Augusta University hosts a student-led club ("Jags for Jags") and an annual mentorship barbecue to publicly champion peer leaders.
Organizational Design: Moving to "Staying, Connecting, and Becoming"
Mentorship is ultimately an organizational design challenge. While traditional research focuses strictly on individual student outcomes, achieving scale requires building a developmental infrastructure across three core pillars:
| Pillar | Focus Area | Institutional Placement |
|---|---|---|
| Staying | Academic integration & persistence | Academic Success Centers, Supplemental Instruction, Departmental Tutoring |
| Connecting | Sense of belonging & social capital | Student Engagement, Transfer Cohorts, First-Gen Networks, Greek Life |
| Becoming | Identity development & career purpose | Pre-Professional Trackers, Alumni Networks, Capstone/SMART Goal Coaching |
"If mentoring fosters staying, connecting, and becoming, why aren't we doing it everywhere? To go institution-wide, you cannot run it on spreadsheets with individual offices collecting data in silos. You need agile technology that delivers mentorship differently across contexts while measuring it consistently at the top."
— Dr. Jennifer Ebinger, Southern Methodist University
Eliminating the "Weakest Link" on Your Campus
During the workshop's self-assessment exercise, attendees identified common friction points stalling their mentorship goals:
- The Visibility Deficit: Many institutions build robust coaching and peer support systems, but students fail to opt in simply because the resource is buried below the campus marketing noise.
- Introversion & Delayed Engagement: Post-2020 student behavior trends show a sharp rise in introverted students who avoid seeking help until academic or social crises have already occurred.
- Spreadsheet Burnout: Staff members spend up to 80% of their operational bandwidth manually pairing students and following up, leaving little time for high-value student intervention.
Centralized peer mentorship platforms solve these challenges by shifting engagement from reactive (expecting students to seek out support services) to proactive (using peer connections to surface early-warning flags around financial aid, academic anxiety, and belonging directly to campus administrators).
Ready to evaluate your campus mentorship ecosystem? Book a strategy session with the Mentor Collective team to map your institution's developmental infrastructure or explore how tech-enabled peer mentorship can scale across your departments.