The Office of Multicultural and International Programs and Services at St. Catherine’s University in St. Paul, Minnesota, will receive the Lee Noel/Randi Levitz Retention Excellence Award at the 2011 National Conference on Student Recruitment, Marketing, and Retention in Denver next week. The university is being honored for its Peer Mentor Program that pairs incoming students of color with sophomore or junior students at the university. Nearly 27 percent of the student at the university are from underrepresented minority groups.
The program has achieved remarkable success. Some 96 percent of all students who entered St. Catherine’s in the fall of 2008 and joined the Peer Mentor Program returned to school the next fall. The next year the retention rate fell to a still respectable 86.7 percent. In both years, the retention rate for students in the Peer Mentor Program was higher than the rate for the student body as a whole.
St. Catherine’s University has only women enrolled in its bachelor’s degree programs but graduate degree programs are coeducational.
