[Webinar]: A Peer Mentorship Model for Transfer Pathways at UTSA and Northwest Vista College

This webinar focused on how The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and Northwest Vista College (NVC) partnered to build a scalable, cross-institutional peer mentorship model that bridges the two-year to four-year transfer divide and boosts degree completion. Moderated by Mentor Collective’s Director of Marketing, Jennifer Kious, the discussion featured Dr. Yolanda Reyes Guevara from Northwest Vista College and Barbara Smith from UTSA, who shared how their cross-campus alignment evolved from transactional hand-offs into a unified pipeline serving transfer-bound students. The conversation highlighted key strategies for eliminating non-cognitive transfer barriers—such as imposter syndrome and hidden institutional knowledge—by introducing peer mentors as early as 15 credit hours into a student's community college journey. They also discussed leveraging Mentor Collective’s automated flag infrastructure to surface critical student needs around financial aid, housing, and academic anxiety for early intervention, as well as the operational impact of saving nearly 1,400 staff hours ($31,000 in direct administrative value) while expanding high-touch support across institutional boundaries.

See Webinar Slides Here.