Gain Greater Visibility of Factors Influencing Student Success

BOSTON, Mass. (April 10, 2023) — Mentor Collective – the leading edtech provider committed to driving student belonging and retention through scalable peer mentorship – has announced a new product update that provides institutions of higher learning access to self-assessment survey results measuring student sense of belonging and academic self-efficacy throughout the year. This new offering is critical to Mentor Collective’s mission to bring student insights to the forefront of institutional strategic planning by giving administrators real-time feedback and alerts when students report feeling low sense of belonging and low academic self-efficacy; two non-cognitive factors associated with positive academic performance and persistence. 

“Because sense of belonging and academic self-efficacy insights are so meaningful, our partners have been telling us just how transformative it would be to have real-time, actionable access to the results of our self-assessment surveys,” said Annemieke Rice, VP of Partner Success at Mentor Collective. “I’m so excited that this update will allow our partners in higher education to identify what students need resources and exactly when they need them.”

After several disruptive years in U.S. higher education and following a decade of declining enrollment, competition for students has never been more fierce and administrative capacity has never been as scarce. Mentor Collective’s mentorship solutions enable two- and four-year colleges and universities to scale high-impact peer and alumni mentorship programs as a means of providing holistic student support and gaining access to student voice through logged mentor conversations and concerns. While Mentor Collective has been providing peer-reviewed surveys for sense of belonging and academic self-efficacy for several years as a means of measuring program impact, this new update gives institutions the ability to access the data on-demand and proactively intervene with resources and support as needed. 

“It’s not about a deficit or something that’s wrong with the student, or an abundance in the student. It’s how they’re feeling,” said Dr. Shannon LaCount, Principal Product Manager at Mentor Collective. “Mentor Collective has been delivering self-assessment survey data back to partners in aggregate to understand the collective needs of students at certain times of the year. Now, with this update, we’re revealing this data individually so that if there are five students struggling in a specific area, our partners can intervene with those five students without having to cast a huge net over the cohort. Partners can know and act on individual student needs.”

Through the Mentor Collective Dashboard, users will now not only see data visualizations related to program engagement, conversation topic trends, and trends in student barriers (known as Flags), they will also see notifications when pre-, mid- and post-program survey results are available and which students could benefit from additional support at that time.