Upward mobility is a matter of who you know, conclude the authors of a newly published study on social capital. (See the data here.) "Economic connectedness" is a key factor in determining who prospers and who doesn't.
“Growing up in a community connected across class lines improves kids’ outcome and gives them a better shot at rising out of poverty,” Harvard economist Raj Chetty, one of the study’s four principal authors, told the New York Times, reports David Leonhardt.
There seem to be three main mechanisms by which cross-class friendships can increase a person’s chances of escaping poverty, Chetty told me.
The first is raised ambition: Social familiarity can give people a clearer sense of what’s possible. The second is basic information, such as how to apply to college and for financial aid. The third is networking, such as getting a recommendation for an internship.
Just living in the same community or attending the same school isn't enough. Young people need to interact. Do the kids from lower-income families try out for the school play, march in the band, sign up for robotics?
Churches with diverse memberships "shine" when it comes to fostering cross-class friendships, he writes. Sports also can connect young people, if affluent families haven't moved their children to "travel teams."
The study used a Facebook data set with 72 million users.
The New York Times' main story downplays the role of family, tweets Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) of the very pro-marriage Institute for Family Studies. After economic connectedness, Chetty finds the biggest predictor of upward mobility is living in a neighborhood with fewer single-parent households.
Scott Winship (@swinshi), who directs Poverty Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, points to The Wealth of Relations, which analyzed a 2018 paper by Chetty and his team. "They found that black men had stronger upward mobility the more low-income black fathers there were in their childhood neighborhood, he writes. "This was true regardless of whether someone’s own father was present, suggesting that even the family cohesion of other black children in the neighborhood affected them."
I wrote Hard Work, High Hopes for Fordham's Education for Upward Mobility conference in 2014. All three high schools I profiled try to prepare students "for going to a college where classmates will be more affluent and a lot whiter than their neighborhood friends," I wrote.
Chicago's Providence St. Mel, a low-tuition school with an all-black enrollment, raises money from donors to fund "Summer of a Lifetime (SOAL)."
Sheila Foster, now a teacher at the school, remembers learning archery, horseback riding, canoeing, and kayaking at a Minnesota camp. Twelfth-grader Jessica Bailey studied theater and classical civilization at Oxford. “My drama teacher was an actor. She called in a dramaturge to work on the script we were doing. We did a workshop at the Globe Theatre.” Jessica made friends from Lebanon, the United Arab Republics, the Philippines, and Cambodia.
Jessica was wearing a polo shirt advertising the previous year's musical, Fiddler on the Roof. An all-black high school did Fiddler? “We thought it was a little odd at first, but it came out great!” says Jessica. “I was Fruma!”
Literally every single one of my juniors and seniors who are on free and reduced meals program also have jobs after school that run well into 10:00 p.m.
These poor kids don't try out for things precisely because they don't have the time for it. They've got to make money.
So the only solution to this problem is money! Money! Money!
College-prep high schools that serve first-generation-to-college students are investing in summer programs that get students into the wider world, such as internships, wilderness programs, classes on college campuses, etc. When I talked to Providence St. Mel alum who'd been sent to summer camp in Minnesota, she recalled her first day at University of Illinois, sitting in a lecture hall surrounded by white students. She thought about how she'd learned to canoe and thought: I can do this.
For me it was the opposite and I know I wasn't alone. In the 16-20 year span I worked summers and holidays in construction jobs. Hot, hard, unpleasant jobs that required a lot more sweat than brains.
This focused my mind quite well on college success: I very much wanted to escape to more brains-oriented jobs that took place in more comfortable conditions. There used to be a lot of teenagers like this: kids with jobs in construction, fast food and such who wanted better and would sacrifice to get it.
For us it wasn't who you knew, but what you had been through. Is the same true today? I don't know.
The NY Times was writing about this ten years ago.
For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html
This has been written about many times before. In the book "Parenting to a Degree" by Hamilton, the author pointed out that first in their family college students who attend state flagship universities are a huge disadvantage compared to the children of upper middle class students whose parents are educated.