Giving Compass' Take: 

• Technology tools are becoming a part of innovation in post-secondary education, and the author highlights a specific mentoring tool called Mentor Collective that connects students to volunteer mentors that are either alumni or mentors from companies. 

• How can mentorship programs extend to year-round relationship-building programs?

• Read about more nuanced mentoring programs that are modeling their approach after medical professionals. 

Promising new approaches should not merely focus on driving student learning, but also on doubling down on another crucial aspect of students’ lives: their social capital. This month we were excited to publish our latest book on innovations in education that stand to radically enrich and expand students’ access to relationships. In tandem with the book, we released a free, searchable market map of tools that are expanding students’ access to relationships.

One of these tools is called Mentor Collective (MC) which helps postsecondary institutions recruit and train networks of volunteer mentors from their student body, alumni network, and corporate partners. Mentors serve as support figures for 1-5 mentees. Once recruited, MC provides online training services to increase the impact of these relationships on outcomes like retention and graduation.

I sat down with MC’s Co-Founder and CEO Jackson Boyar to learn more about their approach. Here is a shortened version of the interview:

Julia: Many universities run mentorship programs, particularly in an effort to retain at-risk students. But those programs can be limited because few have the infrastructure to run those at scale. How are you tackling that dilemma?

Jackson: The average university might have 15-20 pockets of formal mentoring but no standardized infrastructure to ensure student outcomes and justify the allocation of a limited budget. We find that in-house mentoring programs often live—and die—by the tenure of individual, mission-driven administrators.

These are folks who put their heart and soul into running a fantastic program for 40-50 students, but are ultimately challenged by scale and limited by the logistical complexity of recruiting, training, and managing mentors. In addition, when these charismatic individuals move on from their post, the program struggles to stay afloat.

Read the full article about a mentoring tool by Julia Freeland Fisher at Christensen Institute