Making a House (of Learning) a Home: Unlocking Belonging & Resource Utilization

In Part 1 of this series, we compared cultivating a sense of belonging to finding your way around a friend’s new house or apartment. When someone asks you to “make yourself at home” in a place you’ve never been, what needs to happen to achieve that feeling? 

Belonging at an institution can look different depending on what you need. For students like Berklee Online’s Chris D., it can look like having the ability to do your classwork:

“My mentor was able to tell me that Berklee offers discounts, where I could get a coupon code from the school. So he reached out to the advisor, and was able to send me a link to the discount page, or the student deals page – which I wasn’t so aware of. And then I went there, I was able to get a good discount, and buy the whole ProTools pack I needed for my program.” 

It’s confirmed by Tyton Partners' research and affirmed in our work with campuses across the country: awareness of and access to resources impacts students’ sense of belonging. Today, we’ll talk more about what making this connection has done for these students – and how Mentor Collective specifically helps these institutions feel like home for so many.

For University of North Carolina-Greensboro, Resources Equaled Retention

Our most studied example of the connection between resource utilization and student sense of belonging occurred at University of North Carolina - Greensboro. The institution has been designated as a Minority Serving Institution and is nearing a similar designation as a Hispanic Serving Institution. Nearly 50% of their population are first-generation students, and 37% receive Pell Grants. Put another way: the college experience was not designed for a large percentage of their students. But they’re placing their students on track for success, with a #1 ranking for social mobility in North Carolina.  

Another prominent population on UNCG’s campus is transfer students, who comprise 40% of their student body. In a 2021 campus climate assessment, Dr. Samantha Raynor saw troubling numbers:

• 50% of transfer students feel they don’t belong at UNCG
• 29% don’t feel like a part of the UNCG community
• 75% don’t feel a strong connection to the UNCG community

Their Transfer2Transfer mentorship initiative focused on cultivating a sense of connection with previous transfer students who had gone through the acclimatization process on campus and were willing to help others do the same. 

Said one mentor, “I would love to assist transfer students and help in any way [sic] I can for them to call UNCG their new home away from home!”  

Raynor affirmed this mentor’s instincts, noting that help-seeking and resource utilization are being framed not just as options for a student’s time on campus but as a crucial part of the campus’s culture – a feature of the home. She shared, 

“Instead of a student who is already questioning if they belonged, questioning whether or not they can handle college level work simply because they transferred from a two year to a four year institution, [they have] a peer saying ‘No, no, tutoring is what we do, this is how you get through these courses. It doesn’t mean you can’t do the work.’ [It] really was helping these students take advantage of these resources.”

Feature Spotlight: Flags

The Mentor Collective experience has a tool to help bring resources directly to mentors and mentees in times of challenge: Flags. Flags work in concert with our periodic check-in system to let mentors report any challenges their mentee might be having and then direct them to available resources. 

For example, a mentor might hear from a mentee that they’re concerned about being able to stay enrolled for financial reasons. Our system allows the mentor to “raise” a flag about financial concerns, signaling that they need help supporting their mentee.

The Flag function includes an opportunity to connect the mentee with a person on campus to address the concern. If the mentor chooses, a staff member from the campus can reach out to their mentee and offer help. For financial concerns, a Flag might alert someone from the Financial Aid office who can work with the student to explore options. 

Even if the mentor opts not to have a professional notified, a Flag can still provide resources to students in need. Each Flag topic is connected to a number of Discussion Guides, Mentor Briefings, campus websites, and other static resources for mentors and mentees to explore together. These digital guides are searchable within the student dashboard and available anytime in a way that staff or administrators may not be.

When raised thoughtfully, Flags can be a way to strengthen a relationship between a mentor and their mentee. It’s a process that enriches both parties’ knowledge base about their campus and affirms the mentor’s commitment to meeting their mentee’s needs and expectations.

Feature Spotlight: Sense of Belonging Assessment

The beauty of Mentor Collective's data-driven approach is that we don't have to guess whether or not mentorship efforts are contributing to a student's sense of belonging.

The Mentor Collective sense of belonging assessment includes questions for mentors and mentees to understand how connected students feel to their campus, using a Likert scale gauging their agreement with statements like:

• I feel comfortable at my school.
• I feel like I am an important member of my school.
• I feel supported at my school. 

The assessment also includes questions about their likelihood to utilize the people and resources around them, with a Likert scale gauging their likelihood to do things like:

• Reach out to professionals in a career or area [they’re] interested in
• Send emails to professors if [they] have a question or need clarification
• Meet with professors and support staff to discuss [their] goals and interests
• Meet regularly with advisors

And finally, the assessment poses questions about the quality of the mentorship, with a Likert scale gauging their agreement with statements like:

• I am having a positive experience with my mentor/mentee(s).
• I talk with my mentor/mentee(s) as often as I like.
• My relationship with my mentor/mentee(s) is very important to me.

See why Mentor Collective prioritizes Sense of Belonging. 

Through analysis of these questions (posed to participants at the start, middle, and end of their mentorship experience) we were able to see that UNCG’s transfer students’ sense of belonging – again, for mentors and mentees alike – was rising as a direct result of their mentorships and of resource utilization on campus. As was revealed during our “Driving Retention Across the UNC System” online event, “[UNCG] did also see meaningful, [statistically significant] increases in sense of belonging and retention.” As you can see from the questions posed, we can work with you to ascertain precisely how much of that increase can be attributed to mentorship.

Sense of Belonging Makes a House (of Learning) a Home

Returning to our house and home analogy for a moment more, this post was designed to show you what can happen when campuses have equipped and empowered gracious hosts. 

These hosts, who have been new to the space once, should feel able to create a sense of welcome for these budding community members. They should know what to do when handling any unexpected challenges and be able to make thoughtful contact with folks who can help. 

Peer mentors are gracious hosts, able to act at scale in ways that faculty, staff, and administrators simply cannot. Whether these mentors are helping make the college experience affordable, creating affinity with their mentees, or making the most stressful moments fun and communal, they’re using their time and talents to bring their fellow students into the fold...and, as a result, one step closer to the graduation stage.

Want to learn more about how Mentor Collective’s software, resources, and training can increase resource utilization - and, by extension, belonging - on your campus? Let our team show you these features in action with a product demo.