At Onondaga Community College (OCC), student success is everyone’s job. And that’s not just a phrase that gets tossed around - OCC works hard to create an environment where faculty, staff, and students know that to be true. Never has that been more apparent than with the pilot year of their LazerLink peer mentorship program.
Mentor Collective first connected with OCC for a webinar hosted in June 2022, highlighting their program creation, intention, and overall successes. In the time since, OCC has been able to step back and get a clearer look at the impact of the LazerLink program. We were honored to host Dean of Students Dr. Scott Schuhert to discuss his role, how peer and alumni relationship fit into their overall student success strategy, and why having a means for immediate intervention at a two-year institution is important amid competition for enrollment and lagging cohort data.
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LazerLink at Onondaga Community College follows Mentor Collective's Student Success program model, focused on matching incoming students with a purposeful, peer or alumni mentor. OCC worked collaboratively with MC's program designers to tailor recruitment, matching, and key performance indicators for the program.
With Mentor Collective's technology, OCC administrators have a window into the student experience through peer-to-peer interactions recorded via SMS. Mentors are prompted to log conversations and submit early-alert Flags for mentee concerns. These are recorded in the Mentor Collective Dashboard for benchmarking, reporting, and intervention. Mentor Collective also deploys pre-, mid-, and post-program surveys to measure non-cognitive leading indicators of persistence and retention, including sense of belonging and academic self-efficacy.
One of the biggest things that has stood out to Dean of Students Dr. Scott Schuhert is the innovative use of recent alumni to supplement their mentor pool of students. Mentees were signing up for the program at an impressive rate, and OCC wanted to ensure these students had the support they needed. Having worked with a wide variety of program models, Mentor Collective brought up the idea of tapping into recent alumni - specifically alumni who had graduated from OCC in the last 3 years. With OCC in support of this idea, MC recruited those alumni to the program, and was able to match all waiting mentees.
The idea of utilizing alumni as mentors has a proven track record. In a recent Anthology white paper, over 50 percent of surveyed alumni were interested in specifically supporting current students in this way. Furthermore, “Nearly 400 (17 percent) of the responses were from community college alumni. Seventy-two percent of the community college graduates expressed interest in staying connected with their alma mater” (Community College Daily).
While some alumni stay close to where they graduated from, many find themselves potentially living thousands of miles away and/or attending four-year institutions and managing new course loads. The beauty of the LazerLink mentorship program is that it allows those who wish to participate a chance to still connect with students via a range of medium. OCC alumni are able to support current students regardless of their location, and this means there are less barriers to entry. Connected pairs tend to communicate via text message and email (evidenced in both the current and previous program), so this gives alumni the opportunity to support their alma mater from afar.
Read the Full Onondaga Community College Case Study
Watch the Partner Impact Event
Ultimately, it’s important to remember that student needs should come before all else. Rather than hoping that peer mentors would be open to supporting a higher capacity of students, OCC was open to finding other ways to supplement their mentor pool. Utilizing recent alumni proved to work well for their program’s model, and they’ve opted to continue including alumni in their mentor pool moving forward. In this way, no matter where a student is in their lifecycle, they can choose to be part of OCC’s LazerLink mentorship program. Creating strong associations with their school benefits everyone, and since student success relies on everyone’s support, it’s easy to see why.