Peer mentorship is a powerful tool in today's higher education landscape. More in touch with the challenges and experiences of their mentees, peer mentors combine sage advice to navigate college and - many times - a shared generational perspective that makes them more approachable than faculty or staff.
Colleges and universities don't need convincing when it comes to the value mentorship provides students, but find it challenging to facilitate the staff and resources to effectively manage them at scale. Even in an ideal scenario with enough human resource to find the perfect peer or career mentor for every first-year, transfer, community college, technical college, or upper-division student, how can higher education correlate mentorship to impact sense of belonging and ultimately retention?
The answer is student insights.
Built into every one of Mentor Collective's solutions are opportunities for peers to show they're engaging with their mentorship. For a program focused on first-year student success, for example, an interaction between a mentee and mentor might be a conversation via SMS about study tips or how they can best use professor office hours. Following this, a mentor would log the conversation theme – in this case "Academics" – through their Mentor Collective Participant Dashboard. Mentors can also allude to more critical academic or personal situations that require additional resources and/or support from school administrators.
Flags are early alerts logged by mentors when a mentee has voiced a challenge. In addition to providing general cohort trends, Flags allow for individualized support and a window into the student experience to which administrators and leaders rarely have access.
Here's what we've learned from the nearly 30,000 peer-provided insights of 2022.
For Mentor Collective partners, understanding and responding student needs has impacted resource utilization, sense of belonging, and ultimately, retention.