This social capital — the knowledge of how to forge connections that make opportunities visible and attainable — is the missing curriculum in American K-12 and postsecondary education. And it’s a shortcoming with consequences.

Young people from well-connected families absorb social capital almost by osmosis when it comes to learning things like how to ask for help, follow up and signal ambition without arrogance. Others, equally capable but from less-connected families, must figure this out alone. The result is unequal starting lines and unequal outcomes — a yawning between social wealth and social poverty. 

Social wealth means having not only knowledge and credentials, but relationships that open doors, including mentors who give advice, supervisors who challenge us when we need to grow and networks that surface opportunities. Social poverty is the absence of those assets. It is being a talented individual without advocates.

Research finds that students from higher-income families are far more likely to report having mentors who help them consider careers, internships and next steps than students from lower-income backgrounds, first-generation college-goers and young women, especially those without college-educated parents. They report thinner networks and fewer trusted adults to guide them through critical transitions.

One of the most schools and colleges can counter social poverty is through mentorship. It’s not just a “nice to have” experience; young people with mentors are more likely to persist in education and transition successfully into work than those who lack such guidance.

But schools treat mentorship as an optional add-on, something that happens only if a motivated teacher, counselor or employer goes above and beyond.

Psychologist David Yeager what young people need is not generic encouragement, but relationships combining high expectations and genuine support. Effective mentors don’t simply reassure students that they belong. They communicate that growth is expected and that effort will be taken seriously.

This builds trust and reinforces agency. Young people are more likely to persist when they believe that adults see their potential and are invested in helping them meet it.

Yeager suggests these dynamics can be designed and structured rather than left to chance. This doesn’t mean turning schools and colleges into networking factories or diluting academic rigor. It means recognizing that social development is educational development. 

Just as literacy requires instruction and practice, so does learning how to form professional relationships and networks, seek mentorship and navigate institutions.

What would it look like for schools and colleges to design a system that takes this responsibility seriously? Here are six principles to guide this effort.

1. Make mentorship universal, not exceptional. Mentorship shouldn’t depend on self-selection or teacher heroics. Schools and colleges should assign mentors, integrate advisory systems and partner with local organizations to ensure every student has sustained contact with at least one non-family adult mentor. 

2. Start early. Students should encounter mentors beginning in middle school, when identities and aspirations are still forming. These relationships should become more formal and structured as students progress through school and college. Mentorship should be framed as normal, not remedial.

3. Teach the skills of relationship-building. Social capital isn’t only about access — it’s about competence. Students need instruction and practice in how to ask for help, follow up after meetings, give and receive feedback, and navigate professional norms. These skills can be taught, rehearsed and assessed, just like writing or public speaking.

4. Connect learning to people and places. Career exploration should include visits to workplaces, not just abstract classroom discussions about careers. Opportunities to shadow professionals on the job, internships, project-based learning and alumni networks help students see how knowledge travels into the world, and who helps move it along.

5. Signal high expectations with high support. Mentorship programs should avoid coddling or coldness. Adults should communicate clearly that they expect students to grow, stretch and persist, and that they’ll provide the guidance that makes growth possible.

6. Measure what matters. Schools and colleges track test scores and graduation rates but rarely monitor whether students graduate with mentors, references or professional networks. Simple measures, like verifying whether students can name adults who would help them find a job or write a recommendation, should serve as leading indicators of social wealth.

The remedy for this missing curriculum isn’t a mystery. It’s the will to treat social development as a core educational outcome rather than a byproduct. Reframing education around social wealth doesn’t diminish the importance of academic knowledge. It completes it. 

In a world where opportunity increasingly flows through relationships, schools and colleges that ignore social capital risk graduating students who are credentialed but stranded. Those that build it provide young people with the relationships and networks they need so they know that they are seen, supported and connected to a realistic future they can pursue.

That is the curriculum students need. And it’s one that schools and colleges can no longer afford to leave unwritten.

The report by , an organization that connects first-generation college graduates with careers, tracks the experiences of young job seekers, revealing that not all networks are the same. 

It’s particularly crucial to have a network that includes senior professionals, said Sheila Sarem, Basta’s founder. These people unlock resources for first-generation job seekers, like getting a referral or bypassing the typical application. A candidate with a referral was four times more likely to be hired, according to the report.

“The importance of peer and near-peer networks — those networks do matter for a ton for different reasons … [but] the best and fastest and most effective way to [get a job quickly] is to have senior professionals in your network and in your corner,” Sarem said.

First-generation, low-income and underrepresented students have limited access to this type of high-impact social capital, according to the nonpartisan think tank .

“Young people from the top socioeconomic quartile report nearly double the rate of non-family adults accessible to them compared to young people from the bottom quartile,” says a July 2020 institute report. “This gap should be troubling to anyone trying to support students’ success not only in school, but also in accessing high-quality jobs down the line.”

Another major takeaway from the Basta report: Exposure to a broad array of careers counts heavily when trying to land a job, seemingly more important “than just about every other factor we can isolate, including GPA, college major, and having had prior internships.”

The report’s findings were gathered through a career navigation survey software that Basta created in 2020, . More than 10,000 people have used the tool to learn about their strengths, career goals and job search strategies. The majority of Seekr participants are first-generation college students.

Specifically for the report, the data was collected from 3,195 young adults between July 2020 and December 2021. Some 57% were low-income Pell Grant recipients, 62% were first-generation college students, 17% were Black, 21% were Latino, 12% were East Asian or Asian American, 12% were South Asian or Indian American and 6% white. The respondents leaned slightly female — 51% versus 46% who identified as male.

Basta found that most survey participants had a network consisting of personal connections — neighbors, family and friends — and this group asked for career help less often.

Participants with more professional connections asked for help the most, but the ones who sought help most often and converted that assist most successfully were those whose professional networks included senior professionals — professors, managers, mentors. 

Sarem said these findings, plus other Seekr results, help institutions become smarter about how they serve various populations, like first-generation students, and professionals and investors learn more about elevating these critical networks for young people.

Created in 2016, Basta has served more than 9,000 young people and had $3.9 million in annual revenue, according to its most recent 2021 .

“If we believe first-generation college students have everything it takes to succeed in the world of work and we really believe that employers do want to hire across lines of difference, then what’s the problem?” Sarem said. “We built our program model to create some connective tissue across those two audiences.”

A 2023 Center for First-Generation Student Success found that even after earning their bachelor’s degree, first-generation college graduates were less likely to land a job that required it than their peers. One year after getting their bachelor’s in the 2015-16 academic year, 44% of first-generation college graduates had a job that called for the degree versus 52% of graduates who were not the first in their family to finish college.

Basta also offers a free, four- to six-month fellowship program that includes career education and coaching in preparation for a student’s first job out of college. Roughly 81% of fellows secure full-time jobs with an average salary of $62,700, according to Basta. 

Hadler Raymond entered the Basta fellowship in 2020 while attending New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He credits the fellowship for him landing a job at Bloomberg after his 2021 graduation.

Raymond said he would meet with a career success manager once a week to craft resumes and learn transferable skills for future jobs.

“Basta fosters a very strong community,” he said. “Everyone being first-generation is something that helps with that, because everyone could relate to that struggle of having to figure things out by yourself, because your parents can’t necessarily help you with it. The Basta community itself was the perfect network.”

The report, Sachem says, affirms how important social capital is while adding nuance and understanding to what it looks like in practice for first-generation students like Raymond.

“I think over the last four years, there’s just been questions about, like, ‘What does this mean? Do we keep investing in this?’ ” she said. “Well, this is a really important moment to show exactly how critically important the social capital concepts are, when we’re trying to drive economic mobility, which is what education is really designed for — to create more opportunity for more people.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and Heckscher Foundation for Children provide financial support to Basta and ����Ӱ��. 

Research spanning several decades has shown that the seeds of opportunity are planted as early as elementary school. shapes students’ career aspirations and trajectories, while strong youth-adult relationships drive and . When students enter the job market, personal networks open doors to resources, opportunities and promotions. Studies suggest that approximately are obtained through personal connections, and having at least one connection at a company on LinkedIn makes an applicant to land a job than those who don’t. In short, mounting loneliness today widens long-standing opportunity gaps tomorrow. 

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What will it take for schools and programs to invest in students’ relationships as both sources of belonging and bridges to opportunity? To answer this question, our team at the Christensen Institute conducted an 18-month of 20 career-connected learning programs. We sought to understand key factors that impacted schools’ and nonprofits’ ability to deepen and diversify students’ social capital — that is, access to relationships and the ability to cultivate them. Here are three lessons that can help schools and career-connected learning programs unlock the power of relationships.

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Use what you’ve got

Many educators lack the time and resources to develop networking activities from scratch. The good news is that schools are awash in relationships. Educators can double down on deepening those connections through activities that students are already engaged in. For example, rather than a typical guest speaker format in which an industry professional delivers a pre-prepared speech, speakers can engage in a dialogue where students talk about themselves and their career aspirations. Teachers can then create opportunities for students to get back in touch by re-engaging guest speakers on future projects or lessons where their expertise is relevant. In fact, found that teens who engaged in career-oriented conversations with industry professionals earned higher-than-expected wages at age 26. For students participating in internships or apprenticeships, educators can use role-playing exercises to help them develop deeper, more enduring relationships with worksite supervisors and colleagues.

Take, for example, EmployIndy, an Indiana-based nonprofit offering apprenticeship programs for high schoolers. To broaden students’ networks, EmployIndy leaders asked mentors who work directly with student apprentices to incorporate discussions about professional relationships into their regular check-ins. They also created a competition to motivate students to start creating professional networks and encouraged employer-based supervisors to help students build social capital in the workplace. These types of strategies are an easy lift, but powerful in tapping latent reservoirs of opportunity. 

Prioritize experience over explanation

Simply teaching students about the power of networks as a concept won’t cut it. Social capital needs to be part of their everyday experience. When Kupu, a Hawaii natural resources nonprofit, presented a slideshow to help students understand the research behind social capital, the initial response was underwhelming. Student surveys revealed that engagement with those lessons paled in comparison to out-of-classroom experiences such as college and worksite field trips.

Kupu pivoted to integrate opportunities for relationship-building into worksite visits by creating time for interaction with professionals. To build students’ confidence ahead of time, Kupu created opportunities for practice career chats. After the visits, students were asked to reach back out to at least two people for more in-depth conversations about their interests. That experience proved fruitful: 83% of students reported feeling very confident in their ability to follow up with new acquaintances to talk about careers.

Pair skill-building with access to relationships

Building social capital hinges on the ability of schools and programs to play two distinct roles: brokering access to relationships and building students’ relationship skills. However, some teachers found that providing access before honing students’ communication skills diminished their confidence in building new connections.

Generation Schools Network, a Colorado nonprofit focused on community- and career-connected learning, aimed to reduce students’ fears about having conversations with adults they hadn’t met before. They gave middle and high school teachers a series of interactive and engaging communication lessons involving role-playing scenarios, opportunities to practice with peers and trusted adults, and dialogue with students around the anxiety inherent in talking with people they don’t know. Teachers used these activities to prepare students for a project in which they collaborated with local businesses to solve complex problems such as food insecurity and wildlife conservation. Follow-up surveys revealed that 87% of teachers reported that the activities increased students’ communication skills and confidence when talking with businesspeople.

Balancing access and skills is crucial for building and maintaining students’ confidence as they begin to develop professional networks. To unlock students’ potential, schools and programs must not only provide access to connections, but empower them to use those opportunities effectively. Strong networks are a buffer against the inevitable twists and turns of life and career.

Social capital is a critical predictor of educational attainment, academic achievement, health, happiness and economic success, regardless of a student’s socioeconomic background.

Adding to students’ disengagement: Schools often focus on the skills and knowledge needed to navigate a chosen path, but rarely on who. Who do you want to be when you grow up, and who can help you along that path?

To address these questions, the nonprofit launched an online platform that taps the wisdom, skills and experiences of community members nationwide in collaboration with students and educators through real-world learning experiences. Through these opportunities, students become more engaged in school and their neighborhood, develop awareness of career pathways and expand their access to caring adults who share their backgrounds and encourage their interests.

, a local nonprofit makerspace that supports learning by sharing tools and resources, started partnering with CommunityShare in 2019 to cultivate these connections. Through this collaboration, Las Cruces entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers and artists built bridges between communities and classrooms, and expanded the types of projects that students could accomplish.

Cruces Creatives used CommunityShare’s platform — sort of a human library — to post online profiles reflecting the skills and life experiences that its diverse network of makers, academics, parents and business professionals could share with students. Teachers posted project requests, and the platform matched them with partners to serve as mentors, guest speakers, project collaborators and content advisers. With funding from many generous foundations, Cruces Creatives and CommunityShare Las Cruces were able to support classroom projects with mini-grants of up to $500.

In one example, a Sierra Middle School social studies teacher turned her curriculum into a multi-faceted, engaging, real-world cultural experience by connecting to food truck owner Liz Corrales. Through a mini-grant, Corrales brought her food truck to the school. Students created business models, put together a menu and then ate birria tacos while Corrales, a Latina and part-time stay-at-home mom, described how her business literally feeds her community.

Through a vermicomposting project, a sixth-grader at Lynn Middle School learned that his love for worms can lead to careers. His gardening class had collaborated since 2021 with Dr. Emily Creegan, an environmental restoration specialist at Johns Hopkins University, to test composting systems and identify the best option for their school. Supported by Creegan and a program mini-grant, students researched how reducing, reusing and recycling can help the environment, while directly putting their hands on the project, smelling nutrient-rich compost and laughing as they handled wriggly worms deemed either “cute” or “disgusting.” Students built sorting systems, delegated responsibilities, calculated measurements for compost bins, mastered hand tools and played in the soil and sun, all for a project that ultimately launched a schoolwide composting system.

As of spring 2023, CommunityShare projects have brought these and similar projects to over 5,000 students in the Las Cruces Public Schools, supported by 240 teachers and 160 community partners. Consistent with showing the positive correlation between classroom and community engagement, teachers reported through platform-generated evaluations that students are more engaged when they participate in a CommunityShare project. They also reported that the projects help students practice critical thinking, problem solving and teamwork 95% of the time; build social-emotional skills 95% of the time; and better understand real-world applications of academic skills 93% of the time.
All communities are full of amazing people with unique gifts and wisdom to share, and everyone has something to offer: the parent who started a food truck and mentors students in entrepreneurship; the grandmother sharing her lived history of her local neighborhood; the virologist teaching how math can save lives; the glass blower artist demonstrating the artistic interplay of physics, chemistry and creativity; the grad student sharing the realities of navigating college. We invite communities to connect with the and start reimagining communities as classrooms, to ensure all students have the resources and caring humans in their lives to help them realize their full potential.