Building Social Capital
Social Capital and STEMentor
During the development of STEMentor, I have sought to clearly articulate the reasoning and research behind the STEMentor concept and the importance of creating social capital for all students. Recently, I found a book that succinctly makes the point better than I can.
The excerpts below are from the book “Who You Know: Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students’ Networks” by Julia Freeland Fisher of the Clayton Christensen Institute.
“Who you know matters. We can all think back to a time when a personal connection opened a new door to opportunity-or pushed us over the finish line..oftentimes opportunity is social. Social ties inherently shape our man-made systems. Whom you know turns out to matter across all sorts of industries and institutions...In fact, over half of all job placements result from a personal connection.”
“...by their very design, schools limit students’ access to people beyond their embryonic community...many students leave school with a network that resembles the one they inherited at birth. Students who go on to college may buck this trend if they manage to attend an institution that connects them with new peers, professors, and alumni career networks. However, a large proportion of low-income students who could benefit most from these new connections never make it to college, and a large percentage of those who do attend fail to graduate.”
“With everyone talking about what our students do and don’t know, no one is talking about who students know...their reservoir of social capital and ability to bank on that capital for support, advice, or opportunities down the line-remains largely determined by random luck:the luck of where children are born, whom their parents know, and who they happen to end up sitting next to in class. Put simply, the term social capital describes the benefits that people can accrue by virtue of their relationships or membership in social networks or other social structures.”
“Today, our education system focuses the majority of its energy on getting better and better at delivering and measuring what students know. The system in turn vastly undervalues children and young adults’ access to meaningful networks, which leads to stark gaps in access to mentors, supportive adults, industry experts, and diverse peer groups. As a result, advantageous connections, formal and informal mentors, peer networks, and exposure to professions and professionals reside in exclusive networks that children access by sheer luck of the draw.”
“But disruptive innovations are beginning to emerge that will reshape how we connect students to coaches, mentors, experts, and peers. These innovations stand to radically expand students’ access to social capital down the line...For decades, large-scale mentoring like Big Brothers, Big Sisters have required specific time commitments when mentors can meet in person with mentees- a requirement that on the one hand vastly limits its ability to recruit volunteers and on the other makes mentorship a strictly local phenomenon. This poses challenges to quality and scale-quality because the costs of recruiting and retaining first-rate nonteacher volunteers are high, and scale because geographic and time limitations cap the number of feasible relationships and interactions…”
“With the rise of technology, however, new tools and networking models stand to break these limitations. Technology can dramatically expand young people’s access to and ability to maintain relationships with new and diverse adults and peers...As a result, students will be able to connect and form relationships more often and with more supportive adults and peers than ever before.”
“These new relationships and networks can in turn make valuable headway in evening the playing field of students’ opportunities and expanding their sense of what is possible...Growing students’ networks, it turns out, could prove instrumental in solving chronic challenges that our education system has struggled with in the past. For example, we know that poverty erects barriers to learning from a young age. But we don’t invest in the very social supports that could predictably combat those detrimental effects of poverty on children’s healthy development.”