Can Peer Mentoring Platforms Help Colleges Retain Students?

According to a recent white paper from the software company Mentor Collective studying the impact of peer mentorship in higher education, institutions have seen an increase in student engagement and retention since adopting student mentorship platforms like Mentor Collective’s.

Titled EdTech for Equity: Scaling Peer Mentorship to Close Postsecondary Equity Gaps, the study said students who engaged in peer mentorship programming reported an increased sense of belonging, use of campus resources and gains in “spring-fall term-to-term persistence” between 2 to 16 percent. The report analyzed the results of adoption at University of California, Riverside; Saddleback College in California; University of North Carolina Greensboro; Bucknell University in Pennsylvania; and University of Wisconsin-Madison, where administrators worked to provide more support for underserved student populations and “advance an identity-conscious student success agenda.”

“Ninety-two percent of higher-education institutions fail to enroll and graduate students from historically marginalized communities at equitable rates to the general population,” Jackson Boyar, co-founder and CEO of Mentor Collective, said in a public statement. “We hope that by consistently sharing our results with the higher education community ... we are able to show how mentorship can align the business of postsecondary education with the business of being a student.”

The study found that institutions have boosted student retention and engagement with structured and individualized peer-to-peer mentoring programs and strong academic advisement. For example, freshman and transfer-student retention at University of California, Riverside increased after the university launched its Campus Collective program, with freshman retention being 2.1 percent higher than for non-participants and transfer-student retention 5 percent higher. The story was similar at Saddleback College, where mentored students persisted at a rate higher than the students without mentors; and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where 69 percent of newly admitted students who engaged with a mentor indicated their intent to enroll, whereas 17 percent who did not engage with a mentor indicated the same.