William Martinov Jr., executive director of institutional advancement at Mercy College, notes a reality that nearly everyone in higher education acknowledges: students’ experiences in college can be very fragmented. “Higher education is ‘siloed.’ There are passionate people in student life, in the financial aid office, in academic advising. But they’re not seeing the whole student,” he says. And for a first-time, first-generation college freshman, such fragmentation might mean the difference between persisting to the second year and dropping out. That’s why Mercy College, a private institution with about 4,000 undergraduates in Dobbs Ferry, New York, started its Personal Achievement Contract (PACT) program in 2009. The PACT program is designed to address the problem of coherence that stands in the way of students’ success.  The program pairs each first-time, full-time freshman student with a professional mentor who is trained in all the areas in which new students typically need support—including advising, financial aid, career planning, and academic goal-setting. “PACT provides the student with tools to be successful,” Martinov explains. “A mentor really knows a student’s story, and has a deeper sense of what the student is about.” This holistic approach to advising has shown great promise at Mercy in PACT’s first five semesters of existence, with impressive gains in retention that the college hopes to demonstrate are sustainable and replicable at the national level.

Developing the PACT Program

Mercy College President Kimberly Cline and administrators, including Martinov, began discussing the idea for the PACT program in the fall of 2008. As a Hispanic-Serving Institution with more than 25 percent of its students identifying as Hispanic or Latino, Mercy puts special emphasis on educating students who are the first in their families to attend college and who may also come from low-income backgrounds.  Nationwide, these students tend to persist to the second year of college and to graduation at lower rates than their non-first-generation, higher-income peers.  The idea behind PACT was to provide each student with one person who could be their go-to source for help with any sort of problem, be it academic, financial, or personal. This mentor would also work proactively with the student to set and follow up on goals, explore career options and internship possibilities, and find leadership opportunities.

The first pilot group of fifty freshman students began working with PACT mentors in spring 2009. Mercy hired mentors specifically to work on the PACT program, rather than retraining existing faculty or staff members. “We sought out people who were passionate about education, but came from various fields,” Martinov says.  Some mentors had academic advising or counseling backgrounds, and other came from business careers or other fields. All mentors are trained at Mercy to be able to help students solve their problems, whether related to academic, administrative, or personal issues.  If the mentor cannot help a student, he or she can refer the student to the correct person. Mentors also maintain contact with faculty members, especially in cases where a student is struggling academically. If a student is failing a course, his or her mentor is alerted and meets with the student to develop an academic intervention plan, which might include tutoring, meeting with the professor for extra help, or developing a study schedule.

	Students in the PACT program connect with their mentors before they even arrive on campus, and continue to interact regularly with the same person throughout their four years.

The program expanded in fall 2009 to serve 525 students, and will eventually serve a majority of each full-time first-year class, with enough additional mentors being hired so that no mentor has a case load of more than one hundred students.  While PACT is not mandatory for incoming students, so far, most have chosen to participate when given the opportunity.  New students receive a letter inviting them to participate in PACT shortly after acceptance to Mercy, and those who decide to participate are put in touch with their mentor soon thereafter, so the mentor can help students and families prepare for college even before arrival on campus.

Planning for College Success

The overarching goal of the PACT program, says Andy Person, Mercy director of institutional effectiveness and director of PACT, is to tackle what is one of the most pressing problems in American higher education: college completion. “We’re tackling this issue in a very personal way, and providing students with someone who is in their corner in every way,” Person says. He explains that PACT operates using a four-year model in which mentors and students work backward from the end goal: for students to have a job in their field or an acceptance from graduate school within six months of graduation.  So during the senior year, students work with their mentors on college-to-career transition topics, like interviewing. During the junior year, they focus on gaining leadership experience in clubs, activities, or student government. During sophomore year, mentors work to prepare students for applying and completing internships, and during the freshman year, the focus is on personal development, including career interest evaluations and personality and learning style assessments.

But beyond these formal tasks, mentors also fulfill the significant roles of confidante, cheerleader, and, sometimes, provider of tough love. Person described one situation where a first-year student had failed tests in two courses by early October, triggering an academic early alert.  The student’s mentor stepped in, had a frank conversation with the student, and connected her with her professors, who she hadn’t felt comfortable approaching. She ended up earning Bs in both courses and is still enrolled at Mercy. “In a typical situation with an advisor playing a passive rather than an active role, this student might have gotten Ds or Fs in both classes, ended up in academic trouble, and might be thinking about dropping out since she’s doing so poorly so early on,” Person says. “For kids from a lot of high schools, college is the promised land. But what’s happening is that kids are getting to college and washing out. We’re creating a solution.”

Ali DiBona is a mentor and the assistant director of PACT. She works with about 80 students. They come in for regular, scheduled meetings to discuss topics like registering for classes and reviewing financial aid plans, but some also stop by DiBona’s office unscheduled simply to get her advice or share success stories. “Some students I see almost every day, and some come in only when I reach out to them,” she says. “But as I learn each student’s story, it’s easier to see what they might need from me.”  DiBona reaches out to the students she doesn’t often see via e-mail and Facebook, encouraging them to visit more often than just the required sessions.  Occasional Meet Your Mentor days provide another opportunity for her to connect with students.

PACT Outcomes to Date

The PACT program is built on four pillars, Martinov says: it’s individualized, customized, integrated, and focused.  This format has appealed to students and parents; so far, a larger percentage of accepted students have chosen to attend Mercy—instead of another school—than before PACT was created.  And though PACT is still a new program with only five semesters of data, that data has been impressive. Ninety-four percent of students from the fall 2010 freshman class were retained for the spring semester, and overall, students in PACT have shown a 20 percent higher retention rate from the freshman to sophomore year than students who did not participate in the program. And PACT students in a freshman seminar focused on critical inquiry did significantly better than their peers in the course who were not involved in PACT.

Because the first PACT cohort hasn’t reached graduation age yet, it’s still to be seen how these students fare in employment and graduate school acceptance. But because PACT students will all complete at least one internship—often as early as the sophomore year—and participate in guided career preparation with their mentors throughout their time at Mercy, Person expects that the students will demonstrate higher-than-average rates of placement in jobs related to their academic majors.

Person and his colleagues have been making presentations about PACT to other two- and four-year institutions, as well as local K-12 schools, to get feedback on the program and gauge interest for creating similar programs at other schools.  The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) highlighted the PACT program as a best practice for student retention and career services, Martinov says, and the US Department of Education recently awarded Mercy a grant to explore a graduate-level PACT program.  Once the current cohort graduates and Mercy has some solid college completion data, Person wants to begin exploring scalability—whether the program is replicable at a national level. “If solving the problem of college completion were easy, it wouldn’t be a national priority right now,” Person says. “But so far, what we’re doing is working.”