The Science Behind: Messaging

Messaging Feature

Students who sent more messages to their mentors finished the year with better outcomes.

Werntz, A., Deng, Y., Jasman, M., Yowell, C., & Rhodes, J. E. (2026). Effects of a technology-enhanced university peer mentoring program on first-year academic and well-being outcomes. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 1–16.

The act of sending a message to your peer mentor may seem small, but research shows it matters. A study of more than 2,500 first-year students using MentorPRO found that students who sent more messages to their mentors finished the year with higher GPAs, stronger senses of belonging, greater academic self-efficacy, and higher overall well-being. These associations held even after researchers statistically controlled for the background factors that typically predict who thrives in college, including first-generation status, race and ethnicity, gender, and entering GPA. The benefits of staying in touch were not simply a reflection of which students were already on track.

The finding makes intuitive sense. A peer mentor who hears from a student regularly is a mentor who can respond in time to actually help. Messages create the ongoing contact that allows a trained mentor to notice when a student is struggling, normalize help-seeking, and connect that student with the right campus resources before a small problem becomes a serious one. MentorPRO is designed to make that kind of consistent, low-barrier communication as easy as possible.

MentorPRO Is Not Just Good for Students. It Makes Financial Sense for Universities.

Hull, T., & Rhodes, J. E. (manuscript in preparation). Return on investment analysis for the MentorPRO peer mentoring platform. University of Massachusetts Boston.

An economic analysis of the MentorPRO platform found that the program’s benefits substantially outweigh its costs in purely financial terms. Modeling a typical cohort of 1,500 first-year students at a public university and drawing on empirical data showing that each additional message a student sends to their peer mentor is associated with approximately a 3 percent increase in the odds of being retained into the second year, the analysis projected that even a modest 2.5 percentage-point improvement in first-year retention would generate roughly $720,000 in additional tuition revenue — against an annual platform cost of $54,000. That translates to a return on investment of more than 1,200 percent, or over $13 returned for every $1 invested. Under more optimistic but empirically plausible scenarios, those figures rise to more than 50 times the program’s cost. MentorPRO is not just a student support tool; it is a retention strategy with a measurable and compelling financial return.