Three Essential Lessons From Our Social Capital Research

By Jean Rhodes

In 2022, researcher Raj Chetty and his team published a landmark analysis of 21 billion social connections found that “economic connectedness,” (defined as the share of higher-income friends in a low-income person’s social network), is among the strongest predictors of upward mobility ever identified. If low-income children grew up in communities with the cross-class connectedness typical of higher-income peers, their adult earnings would increase by roughly 20 percent on average. In short, who you know shapes where you end up, often more than what you know.

My  entry into research on social capital came more than two decades ago, when, as members of the MacArthur Foundation Network on the Transition to Adulthood, we conducted a large-scale randomized controlled trial of the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program across 10 sites and 3,074 participants (Millenky et al., 2013). The study found significant effects three years after random assignment on GED and diploma attainment, college credit receipt, employment, and earnings. What was particularly striking was the program’s distinctive mentoring component. Rather than matching young people with mentors, the program required them to nominate mentors from within their own networks, a model it called youth-initiated mentoring (YIM). A mixed-methods analysis found that cadets in enduring mentoring relationships showed significantly stronger retention of educational and vocational gains, and that relationships lasted longer when youth chose their own mentors and when mentors and mentees shared the same racial background (Schwartz, Rhodes, Spencer, and Grossman, 2014). The question that emerged from this work was whether young people could be taught to deliberately recruit not just one mentor but a broader network of connections. The question was taken up by Sarah Schwartz, then a doctoral student and now a tenured professor at Suffolk University, whose work gave this line of research its empirical foundation. A qualitative pilot with underrepresented college-bound high school seniors found that students were largely unaware that reaching out to faculty and staff was expected and welcome, and they left the intervention with concrete plans to do exactly that (Schwartz, Kanchewa, Rhodes, Cutler, and Cunningham, 2016). The paper’s title captured the finding well: “I didn’t know you could just ask.”

The Connected Scholars Research Progression

Schwartz and Kanchewa then developed that pilot into a full curriculum over the following years. A quasi-experimental trial in a summer bridge program found significant effects on help-seeking intention, network orientation, instructor relationships, and first-year college GPA (Schwartz, Kanchewa, Rhodes, et al., 2017). A subsequent randomized controlled trial of the semester-long Connected Scholars course replicated the social capital and help-seeking effects (Schwartz, Parnes, Browne, Austin, Carreiro, Rhodes, Kupersmidt, and Kanchewa, 2023). These findings converge with Kitchen and colleagues’ new (2025) mixed-methods study showing that peer mentoring increased low-income students’ academic self-efficacy and sense of belonging largely through proactive guidance and relational validation, suggesting that the active ingredients in social capital interventions may be less about information transfer than about changing students’ felt sense of permission to seek support.

Then, drawing on six years of UMass Boston administrative records, clinical doctoral student Emily Hersch and colleagues found that students who completed Connected Scholars had 3.23 times the odds of graduating in four years, and those who passed it had 3.42 times the odds (Hersch et al., 2025). For context, a 2019 meta-analysis of 70 youth mentoring program evaluations covering more than 25,000 young people found consistent but modest average effects across outcomes, with targeted programs producing effect sizes roughly double those of nonspecific ones (Dubois et al., 2019). Against that backdrop, the Connected Scholars graduation findings are large, and they suggest that intervening specifically on social capital and help-seeking behavior, rather than on outcomes more diffusely, may be an especially productive target for college-based mentoring programs.

Recognizing that a for-credit course would have limited reach, our team worked with single-session intervention researchers Jessica Schleider and Mallory Tobias to develop Connected Futures, a free 20-minute online course that compresses the curriculum into a personalized Social MAP: Mission, Ask, and Plan. The course has been adopted by more than 50 partners worldwide, including the Mentor Canada. A parallel study with Step Up Women’s Network extended the model to a digital flash mentoring platform combining a curated network of pre-screened professional mentors with the Connected Futures course (Rhodes, Werntz, Jasman, and Druilhet Morton, 2026). Over two years, 285 mentors and 363 mentees generated more than 5,000 messages and 316 meetings. Step Up continues to use the approach. A growing number of Big Brothers Big Sisters affiliates, including BBBS Ocean County, are also piloting the approach.

Conclusions and Future Directions

Across this body of work, three findings stand out.  First, social capital can be taught. Young people from low-income and first-generation backgrounds often do not feel entitled to support and avoid reaching out to adults who could help them. Structured training changes that, and the effects on concrete outcomes like graduation are not trivial. Second, network breadth matters.

Second, Hersch and colleagues found that cultivating a web of support rather than relying on a single mentor predicts lasting institutional success, a finding that aligns with Chetty’s population-level evidence that cross-class connectedness, not bonding cohesion within one’s existing network, is the mechanism most strongly linked to upward mobility (Chetty et al., 2022).

Third, dosage can be compressed, but access must be built in. Skill-building only works if young people also have access to a network of willing mentors to approach. The flash format expands reach, but the relationship remains the vehicle.

Open questions remain. Whether gains persist into the labor market, which curriculum elements carry the most weight, how the model performs outside UMass Boston’s specific context, and whether flash formats can replicate the graduation effects of the full course all await further investigation. But we now have natural laboratories in which to answer them, and a body of converging evidence, from large-scale economic data to program-level randomized trials, that points in a consistent direction. Social capital is not a fixed endowment. It is a skill, and it can be taught.

 

References

Chetty, R., Jackson, M. O., Kuchler, T., Stroebel, J., and colleagues. (2022). Social capital I: Measurement and associations with economic mobility. Nature, 608, 108-121.

Dubois, D. L., Portillo, N., Rhodes, J. E., Silverthorn, N., and Valentine, J. C. (2011). How effective are mentoring programs for youth? A systematic assessment of the evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 12(2), 57-91.

Hersch, S. E., Werntz, A. J., Schwartz, S. E. O., Raposa, E. B., Hughes, D. E., Parnes, M. F., and Rhodes, J. E. (2025). Testing the effects of a social capital intervention on college student retention. American Journal of Community Psychology, 76(1-2), 167-182.

Kitchen, J. A., Culver, K. C., Rivera, G., and Corwin, Z. B. (2025). Promoting low-income college student success through peer mentoring. Teachers College Record.

Millenky, M., Schwartz, S. E. O., and Rhodes, J. E. (2013). Supporting the transition to adulthood among high school dropouts. Prevention Science, 15(4), 448-459.

Rhodes, J. E., Werntz, A., Jasman, M., and Druilhet Morton, D. (2026). Stocking the pond. Youth, 6, 35.

Rios-Aguilar, C., and Deil-Amen, R. (2012). Beyond getting in and fitting in: An examination of social networks and professionally relevant social capital among Latina/o university students. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 11(2), 179-196.

Schwartz, S. E. O., Kanchewa, S. S., Rhodes, J. E., Cutler, E., and Cunningham, J. L. (2016). “I didn’t know you could just ask.” Children and Youth Services Review, 64, 51-59.

Schwartz, S. E. O., Kanchewa, S. S., Rhodes, J. E., et al. (2017). “I’m having a little struggle with this, can you help me out?” American Journal of Community Psychology, 61(1-2), 166-178.

Schwartz, S. E. O., Parnes, M. F., Browne, G. R., Austin, S. B., Carreiro, A., Rhodes, J. E., Kupersmidt, J. B., and Kanchewa, S. S. (2023). Teaching to fish. American Educational Research Journal, 60(4), 805-844.

Schwartz, S. E. O., Rhodes, J. E., Spencer, R., and Grossman, J. B. (2014). Youth initiated mentoring. American Journal of Community Psychology, 52(1-2), 155-169.

Spencer, R., Tugenberg, T., Ocean, M., Schwartz, S. E. O., and Rhodes, J. E. (2016). “Somebody who was on my side.” Youth and Society, 48(3), 402-424.

van Dam, L., et al. (2021). Youth initiated mentoring: A meta-analytic study. American Journal of Community Psychology, 68(1-2), 88-100.