Florida Atlantic University (FAU) is the most racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse institution in Florida’s State University System. Our student body contains large segments of students considered to be in “at-risk” populations (i.e. first-generation, STEM majors and underrepresented minorities) with 1,595 (over 50%) of last year’s entering freshmen (fall 2014) being underrepresented minorities and 702 (44%) pursuing STEM degrees.
The State Board of Governors instituted a performance based funding model which set benchmarks for first-year student retention and graduation. With over 25% of our first-year students failing to reenroll for their second year at the institution and low six-year graduation rates (45%), FAU was penalized losing significant funding from the state. As we continue to admit students deemed “at-risk” or otherwise, we must be committed to their success.
Recently, FAU was the recipient of a grant to fund a new, comprehensive mentoring initiative called “The Mentoring Project” which is designed to assist with improving student success outcomes (i.e. retention, progress, and graduation rates). This three year grant will establish The Mentoring Project, a collaboration between the Divisions of Academic Affairs and Student Affairs, as the “central hub” for helping students reach their full potential by connecting them to compassionate and trained faculty, staff, and peer mentors. The overarching goal is for mentoring to be integrated into our holistic student success framework to support the overall institutional commitment to retaining and graduating students.
The Mentoring Project established the Connections mentoring program as a solution to stem the attrition of students during their freshmen year. Connections far exceeded the initial goal of recruiting 50 faculty/staff mentors and 100 mentees for its first cohort with a total of 187 mentors being matched with 464 mentees in the first semester. We were met with overwhelming interest among first-year students who applied to be mentored and received strong interest from FAU faculty, staff, graduate students, and upper division students to serve as mentors. The commitment to offer a new university wide approach to mentoring is clearly a priority throughout the university.
The process of matching mentors with mentees was extremely labor intensive requiring a significant amount of time (at least 80 man-hours) to complete with the staff first performing a pre-match and then finalizing matches for the 651 unduplicated participants within a two-week period. In lieu of software to perform matching, the staff currently uses Google docs to manage the application process by gathering profile information and then exports the data into Excel spreadsheets to create nearly 500 matches by hand. These matches are based on a large number of variables obtained through the mentor/mentee profiles, manually sorted and carefully screened, to create quality matches – all of which is necessary and the single most important factor in building sustainable mentoring relationships.
The manual matching process presents two of our greatest challenges: 1) managing the program’s volume as we increase program participation by 95% and 27% over the next two academic years; and 2) matching participants in a timely manner as we understand that the timeframe and juncture at which mentees are connected with their mentors is also a critical factor in building the mentoring relationship. This fall, mentees and mentors were not matched until the end of September – almost six weeks into the semester. Obtaining software would significantly increase our efficacy in the matching process by allowing us to have a system that would reduce both the man hours by 100% (40 hours) and the time-frame for matching allowing participants to connect three to four weeks earlier in the semester.
While we exceeded our initial targets for the grant, we know that the project requires more work to fulfill its goals. Unfortunately, with 85% of the project’s budget dedicated to salary, there was no funding left to integrate technology into the grant. The matching process as it stands leaves the program staff to continue the inefficient and laborious task of hand-matching mentees with mentors and does not provide our students with the best possible scenario for mentoring success.
In addition to matching the process, the Connections program tracks participant engagement, offers match support (by tracking face-to-face activities, contacts, goal setting and progression), and conducts ongoing assessments. As of October 1st, Connections can report that participants have had 1000 plus visits and contacts. Our staff has also made 443 contacts to support those mentor/mentee matches who expressed some difficulties in the beginning of the relationship. While we are able to report these numbers, this has not been without challenge as we have had to develop additional surveys and utilize other software platforms to gather this data. The challenge here is our volume of participants and projected growth. Again, obtaining software would significantly increase our productivity with tracking, match support, and assessment since the proposed software platform would allow us to conduct all of these processes in one location.
Presently, mentoring programs at FAU are decentralized and many departmentally-based mentoring programs do not have existing methods to track mentor/mentee matches, number of contacts, number of meetings, and progress towards desired student goals and outcomes. In addition, the systems in use are manual and do not provide tracking data or connect participants to future mentoring opportunities. The challenge of the current system is its inability for reporting student engagement and assessing outcomes. Acquiring this software would lay the ground work to eventually allow for multiple programs outside of Connections the same range of functionalities, reduce the possibility in the duplication of mentoring efforts across FAU’s campus, allow for further collaborative efforts due to the streamlined communication platform, and could potentially standardize how we assess and evaluation mentoring programs campus-wide.
Ultimately, our aim is to create a “pipeline of mentoring” where students are continuously matched with mentors throughout their entire college experience, thereby enhancing students’ chances to be retained, graduate and obtain successful employment. Incorporating mentoring software is imperative to ensure ease of comprehensive program management, mentor/mentee (student) registration and match support in a timely and efficient manner.
The proposed project is to acquire and implement the use of mentoring software to start, manage and measure mentoring program engagement and outcomes in support of the Board of Governors metrics. Mentoring software would provide a single platform solution and streamline program management. Specifically, we seek funding for a three-year license for the mentoring software Chronus that would be accessible to The Mentoring Project and all faculty/staff mentors and student mentees.
This proposal is aligned with FAU’s Strategic Plan in several respects. The Strategic Plan emphasizes, “Increase enrollment in Board of Governors’ areas of strategic emphasis”. Year one of the grant targets students majoring in the STEM fields to participate in the “Connections” mentoring program. The Strategic Plan also states: “Develop an academic support structure for timely student graduation: Improve undergraduate student retention and graduation rates.” The Mentoring Project was developed as an intentional solution to help stem the attrition of first year freshmen in support of the Board of Governors Metrics, specifically the academic progress and the six-year graduation rates.
Furthermore this proposal will support students’ holistic development through setting goals with their mentors, demonstrating personal accountability for exploring majors, obtaining internships, and developing career goals in support of their interests and skills. By connecting students with undergraduate research and other forms of experiential learning they will attain competencies that prepare college students for successful transition into the workforce. Beyond the traditional measures of student success, the impact of operating a more efficient program (via the mentoring software) can be seen financially by increasing the revenue generated from the tuition per student retained annually ($9k). Utilizing current participation in Connections (435 freshmen) and projecting retaining a very conservative estimate of 50 students (11%) of that population, this would generate $450k annually. Considering this over a three year period, that would generate $1.35M during that time-frame. This is without considering any growth in the Connections program participation, nor the impact of retaining freshmen associated with the other 22 mentoring initiative across FAU attached to The Mentoring Project by the Mentoring Council.
In preparing this proposal we participated in two demos from two companies, Compatibility and Chronus. While they both offer mentoring software platforms, Compatibility is brand new and is currently in the process of developing tools and functionality which Chronus already has in place as a recognized leader in mentoring software. We also had phone conversations with other Florida SUS institutions who expressed their satisfaction with Chronus in supporting their mentoring programs.
