Student Success and Retention Conference 2025

Mentorship can be a transformative tool for student success, but effective mentorship doesn’t happen by chance—it requires intention, strategy, and adaptability. This session will take a practical, hands-on approach to building mentorship programs that work.  We’ll explore how to identify and prepare mentors who inspire growth and inclusion, navigate common challenges like mismatched expectations or ineffective mentors, and empower mentees to build diverse mentoring networks that meet their unique development needs. Key topics include:  Recruiting and training mentors with empathy, cultural humility, and adaptability. Understanding when to pivot from a mentoring relationship with a "no-fault divorce." Building a mentor network tailored to specific growth areas, like leadership, storytelling, or strategic thinking. Structuring mentorship relationships to fit different timelines, from short-term to situational engagements. Attendees will engage in interactive activities to design mentor maps and practice strategies for managing and gracefully ending mentoring relationships. They’ll leave with actionable tools to create impactful mentoring programs that empower students while fostering a culture of inclusion and growth.

Although you may think of Restorative Justice as being primarily about repairing harm or as a tool to replace punitive forms of discipline, restorative justice principles can also be used to proactively build the relationships and skills we need to support one another, to put voice to our concerns, and to navigate challenging situations. This session will explore one of the central tools of restorative justice practice, the Circle. Circles can be used in classrooms and with colleagues to build community and to repair harm. We will take time to provide some context and history of Circles as well as to demonstrate some Circle elements. We will also offer space to collectively consider ways we might be able to integrate Circles into our own higher education settings.

The Ford Family Foundation administers four scholarship programs that annually serve 1,000+ active scholarship recipients attending 100+ colleges and universities throughout the United States. The Foundation has awarded scholarships to nearly 7,000 students since the inception of its scholarship programs in 1994. Given this context, supporting the multi-faceted needs of our scholarship recipients and alumni in a changing higher education landscape is, in and of itself, a unique problem and an exciting opportunity. It’s a worthy problem-tunity. In this presentation, we will discuss our Student Supports portfolio, the evolution of our strategy and opportunities for future collaboration. Key themes for our presentation include: strategies for supporting students during key transitions in their postsecondary journeys, redefining programmatic success beyond retention and completion metrics and embracing social and economic mobility indicators as markers of programmatic success.

Join this interactive session to learn more about Career Connected Learning initiatives and impacts in Oregon from the viewpoint of the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, Achieving the Dream, and a community college Career Connected Learning Systems Navigator, with input from the Oregon Department of Education. This session will focus on the experience and insights of CCL Systems Navigators and feature a report from Achieving the Dream on the implementation and impact of the Career Connected Learning Systems Navigator initiative at Oregon’s community colleges. Attendees will provide feedback on the report’s recommendations and discuss actions that can be taken at their college or university to enhance student support and retention through Career Connected Learning. Whether you’re a college or university administrator, faculty member, student affairs professional, or workforce partner, we want your insights about leveraging Career Connected Learning to improve collaboration and student outcomes statewide.