Editor’s note: Several Summer Bridge peer mentors were granted anonymity due to concerns over retaliation over their job position.

Beginning in the 2024-2025 school year, the Summer Bridge Program and the UCSD Mentor Collective are being consolidated into just the Mentor Collective. In response, many Summer Bridge mentors and alumni issued an open letter response, objecting to the decision.

UC San Diego’s Summer Bridge Program, housed within the Office of Academic Support and Instructional Services, is a mentorship program for low-income, first-generation freshmen at UCSD. Students enroll in summer courses and receive resources, advice, and mentorship from upperclassmen in order to prepare to navigate the unfamiliar campus. In the past, Summer Bridge mentors have been full-time employees with copious training over the summer to ensure they meet the needs of their students, although their hours have been significantly lowered since the combination of the two programs.

UCSD’s Mentor Collective, a voluntary program, also pairs incoming students with an advisor to support their transition to their first year on campus. Following a 30-minute training, Mentor Collective mentors match with several students and check in about once a month to provide their students resources.

There are several discrepancies between how the Mentor Collective and the Summer Bridge Programs function. One of the most immediately apparent differences is between their wages. The Mentor Collective is fully voluntary, while Summer Bridge is a paid job.

An anonymous student coordinator for the Summer Bridge Program explained UCSD’s solution to this issue: UCSD will continue paying Summer Bridge mentors for the time they dedicate to the Mentor Collective while volunteers originally intended for the mentorship program will continue providing their services for free. Many interviewed Summer Bridge mentors expressed concern about the unequal treatment, believing that their different pay rates may cause resentment among them.

Mentors for the Summer Bridge Program also receive significantly more extensive training than Mentor Collective mentors. The students in the Summer Bridge Program typically benefit from a more hands-on mentorship approach, which Mentor Collective mentors may be unprepared to provide. For example, the student coordinator noted that, while Summer Bridge mentors are mandated reporters, Mentor Collective mentors receive no such training.

“Things come up. Is everyone [in the Mentor Collective] going to know what to do if those things are brought up to them?” she said.

Conversely, several Summer Bridge mentors argued that their specialized skillset and training are mismatched for the students in the Mentor Collective. A first-time Summer Bridge mentor expressed her discontentment with becoming a part of the Mentor Collective.

“There’s a massive discrepancy, where we’re stooping down to their level,” she said. “We’ve done intensive training, and we know what mentorship is supposed to be. And now, we’re working for this program that doesn’t even highlight the importance of it.”

Many of the interviewed Summer Bridge mentors also expressed concern about their ability to properly serve the students in the Mentor Collective. Summer Bridge mentors tend to match the demographics of the average Summer Bridge student, and many of them have also gone through the program themselves. However, many mentors shared the belief that the original Mentor Collective program was mostly made up of transfer students.

“I’ve been in this program for four years,” the student coordinator explained. “I, as a sophomore, could not answer questions about transfer students and where they should go. We are able to talk to each other, and we build these bonds within our community because we have shared very similar experiences, unlike within the Collective.”

These shared experiences are the backbone of the connection between Summer Bridge mentors and their students. Because the majority of Summer Bridge students are first-generation college students who are unfamiliar with the university sphere, they tend to reap greater benefits from more frequent assistance adjusting to life on campus.

An anonymous second-time mentor mentioned that some of her students required her assistance to successfully complete their housing contract. Without mentorship from Summer Bridge, she fears they wouldn’t have housing.

Sarah Aranda, who has served as a mentor in both programs, spoke about her experience in the Mentor Collective program.

After completing the Mentor Collective’s matching survey, Aranda found herself paired with just one student. Partway through the year, he stopped responding to her, leaving her without any mentees.

“So I was like, you know what?” Aranda said, “I gave it my all, and this student doesn’t want it.”

The first-time mentor commented on the experiences of some of her transfer student friends within the Mentor Collective. Many reported that their mentor ghosted them, and most didn’t feel a strong connection with their mentor.

“At the very least, the best I heard [from my friends] was, ‘I mean, they sent me resources,’ but that was it,” the first-time mentor said.

Oppositely, alumni of the Summer Bridge program attested to their immense love for the program.

An anonymous alumni student coordinator explained her experience with joining the Summer Bridge community in her freshman year. Although she was afraid of leaving her hometown and moving far away for college, she cited the program as her path to making friends and settling in here at UCSD.

Aranda mentioned that her mentor was crucial to her feeling a sense of belonging at UCSD. Because she is a first-generation minority student, she felt out of place at such a large university. The Summer Bridge Program assured her that she did, in fact, deserve to be here.

Janica Ramos, Thurgood Marshall College freshman who is enrolled in the Summer Bridge Program, mentioned something similar when reflecting on her short time with her mentor.

“My mentor was the first person who ever told me that I belong at UCSD, and just imagining another student not having that available to them is very shocking to me,” Ramos said.

The sense of connection, solidarity and community embodies what students and staff love most about the Summer Bridge Program. Many of these students interviewed viewed the Mentor Collective as being a “watered down” or “failing program,” which was trying to save itself by “copying someone else’s homework.”

Aranda spoke to her perception of the difference in care between the voluntary Mentor Collective and the Summer Bridge Program.

“These Summer Bridge students — they signed up for this. Us, as mentors, we signed up for this. They know that they’re going to get help, and we know that these students need help. Whereas [in] the Mentor Collective, these students can want the help or need the help, but they’re not putting in the effort,” she said.

Many Summer Bridge staff feel strongly that this is the wrong decision. One of the most prominent criticisms of the merge is that Summer Bridge mentors, who already began mentoring over the summer, will no longer be paired with their original students. Both Summer Bridge mentors and mentees will be placed into the Mentor Collective platform to be re-matched, severing the bonds that had been created.

Ramos spoke about her experience losing her mentor, and the lack of formal communication that accompanied this change.

“It’s very destabilizing to have this announced so suddenly and also get emails from [the] Mentor Collective to sign up,” Ramos said. “Knowing that our [Summer Bridge] mentors are people who are affiliated with the Summer Bridge community already and know what it’s like to be in our shoes, [reassigning mentors] is fully sweeping the rug from underneath us.”

Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Retention and Success Maruth Figueroa spoke on behalf of the program’s administrators on the reasoning for their decisions.

“The goal is to expand opportunities for Summer Bridge-eligible students who didn’t participate by leveraging the two programs,” Figueroa explained. “The partnership with [the] Mentor Collective is an example of leveraging the strengths within Student Retention and Success to expand these opportunities and stay focused on the student-centered values that guide our work.

Figueroa assured that both mentors and mentees had a chance to ask questions and receive answers and that the transition would be smoothed out as the year progressed. However, many of the student staff members expressed frustrations with the delayed notice of this information, as well as with the lack of transparency in the process. Although mentors were warned of an incoming change before the merger happened, they felt blindsided by the severity of it once it was announced.

Several student staff members noted that the recording of the meeting announcing this combination of programs stopped only 16 minutes into an hour-long meeting, cutting off as soon as students were able to ask questions.

The student coordinator critiqued the “hush-hush” nature of their announcements.

“I feel like that raises a big, big red flag because this really is a change that no one has control of,” she said. “It wasn’t even the process of talking about it. It was a made decision already; we were just getting a notification of it.”

The student coordinator also spoke about the confusion surrounding her role. Given that the student coordinator position does not involve working as a mentor, her job prospects are unclear.

“Do I have a job? Because, when I asked in the meeting, it was like, ‘Oh, that’s a conversation for another day.’ And you know, that’s something that was also left out of the recordings,” she said.

Several mentors noted frustration with the lack of clarity regarding answers to their questions. Many of them reported asking follow-up questions after the meeting, but none had received a satisfactory response, if they received a response at all.

With the new school year kicking off, the student staff of the Summer Bridge Program have to decide whether to stay with the program or not. Some, like Aranda, plan on quitting due to the change being “unfair.”

However, abandoning the Mentor Collective may be easier said than done. For many mentors, the income they planned on receiving from Summer Bridge is essential to make ends meet.

The second-time mentor spoke to this.

“I can’t just drop a job within 5-6 days’ notice,” they explained. “So, I’m unfortunately going to continue with the Mentor Collective out of pure necessity and living need.”

The future of the Summer Bridge program remains unclear. While it still exists, peer mentorship is a core part of it, and its identity is changing. There are still many unanswered questions that weigh on students’ minds.

The student coordinator pointed out that many UCSD scholarships require participation in the Summer Bridge Program. She alleged that those scholarship programs had not yet been informed of this drastic change in the Summer Bridge Program and worried that many students might fear losing their scholarship.

An anonymous Summer Bridge alumna also pointed out the potential dangers this decision could pose to other mentorship programs on campus.

“It creates a slippery slope,” she said. “There are so many other mentorship programs at UCSD. … Who’s to say that Summer Bridge is going to be the only mentorship program that’s going to be impacted?”

The Mentor Collective seeks to expand and improve the lives of many more students, but the trajectory and future of the Summer Bridge Program remain unclear. Many student mentors are at a crossroads between their values and their financial needs. The costs and benefits of the decision to merge the programs are difficult to fully weigh until the dust settles.

The alumni student coordinator summarized the collective sentiment of the student staff: “I didn’t expect these changes to be so drastic. If the Mentor Collective doesn’t have any good mentors, why is it a thing? And why are they taking students and mentors from our program that caters to underrepresented students? I don’t know.”