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After creating over 200,000 relevant mentorships, here’s what we’ve learned: When mentors and mentees are given agency to choose how they're matched with a mentor, they talk more, enjoy their mentorship experience more, and have a higher likelihood of receiving the critical navigational guidance they need.
Our data scientists and engineers love efficiency almost as much as they love knowing the algorithms they put in place lead to impactful college experiences. So when they discovered statistically significant factors affecting student engagement and satisfaction, they rolled up their sleeves and sought to make our matching programming better than ever.
Mentor Collective's refined matching practice is enhanced by the same Nobel Prize-winning algorithm used by the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) to appropriately allocate medical school students to hospitals. Known as the Gale-Shapley Algorithm, the technology listens to students’ preferences first and foremost with a series of weighted survey characteristics so that better matches are produced on a grander scale.
Why is the right match important for meaningful mentorship in higher ed?
When students have peer mentors aligned with various facets of their identity and life experience, it can be easier to open up and accept assistance – whether they're looking for time management tips or facing financial challenges. Surveys from Best Colleges show that students overwhelmingly turn to friends versus other influencers in their life (65% turn to friends followed by a parent or guardian).
Considering the infinite combinations of academic preparedness, lived experience, and identity that students bring with them into college, having a peer "who gets you" can be the difference between feeling like you belong and feeling lost.
How can we help you make mentorship a keystone of student success?
Our programs scale to serve tens of thousands but retain a focus on the individual student experience.
While maintaining rigorous standards for match quality, we can match thousands of students in a matter of minutes; saving your team valuable time and making sure students get access to the right mentors quickly.
We can add questions to the matching survey based on your unique student population, location, and strategy.
Our matching surveys are configurable to meet the needs of your institution and its student success strategies. As such, our partners receive a thorough onboarding process that allows them to add, edit, or remove matching questions. Each year you have the program these can be updated to reflect learnings from the previous year.
See How University of Wisconsin - Superior Leverages Intake and Matching Data to Contextualize Student Challenges
We provide the best mentor for every mentee – even with tens of thousands of participants
Since our system can compare various combinations of 80+ dimensions of identity, affinity, and life experience from groups as large as tens of thousands of students, we ensure that every student gets the best possible match for them. Student preference is also taken into account, letting participants drive their unique experience. If a participating mentee selects a characteristic of utmost importance – such as a common language or major – that will be weighted most heavily so that mentors are rated 10x more highly if they share that characteristic.
Whether a mentee is the 1st or 100th person to enroll, they’ll receive their best match
In traditional, in-house mentorship programs, if a mentee were the 100th to sign up, they would be 100th in line for their school's administrator to find them a mentor. At that point, it’s possible the best mentor would have already been matched to capacity (and with mentees with fewer shared interests/experiences). That's not only troublesome for students, but for the administrators using countless spreadsheets to cross-reference student traits and preferences. Just think of what they could do with all the extra time saved!
For any given group we match at the same time, so the order in which participants sign up does not matter.
See our Matching Survey in Action!
At Mentor Collective, we’re on a mission to make life-changing mentorships a feature of every student’s college experience. Every update we make to our platform and the feedback we get from our partners bring us closer to realizing that goal.
Learn more about our newest update to the matching algorithm and how it can enhance your current campus programming by speaking with one of our partner success managers.