It’s very encouraging that an increasing number of employers are committing to play their part in improving social mobility. It is becoming clear, though, that transactional and short-term attempts at talent engagement do not yield the results needed for employers or the communities they seek to engage.
So what can employers learn from nonprofits that achieve positive outcomes that do improve social mobility?
My guest this week is Irene Shih, CEO of Minds Matter Bay Area. This education nonprofit connects driven and determined students from low-income families with the people, preparation, and possibilities to succeed in college. Minds Matter Bay Area has been incredibly successful with its mission, and Irene has some critical learnings to share that employers focusing on social mobility will find extremely valuable.
In the interview, we discuss:
• What is college undermatching, and why is it important to solve it
• The importance of networks
• What are the most significant barriers to top college entrance for low-income students?
• Economic connectedness and cross-class friendships
• What are the interventions that lift people out of poverty?
• Positive outcomes
• Trust and relationships
• The importance of long-term talent engagement and why transactional approaches don’t work.
• Advice to employers on improving social mobility
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder (1m 2s):
Hi there This is Matt Alder Welcome to Episode 528 of The Recruiting Future Podcast. It’s very encouraging that an increasing number of employers a committing to play their part in improving social mobility. It is becoming clear though that transactional and short term attempts at talent engagement do not yield the results needed for employers or the communities they seek to engage. So, what can employers learn from nonprofits that achieve positive outcomes, that do improve social mobility? My guest this week is Irene Shih CEO of Minds Matter Bay Area This education nonprofit connects driven and determined students from low income families with people preparation and possibilities to succeed in college.
Matt Alder (1m 52s):
Minds matter. Bay Area has been incredibly successful with its mission, and Irene has some critical learnings to share that employers focusing on social mobility will find extremely valuable. Hi Irene and welcome to the podcast.
Irene Shih (2m 8s):
Hi Matt. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
Matt Alder (2m 11s):
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Irene Shih (2m 17s):
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m Irene Shi. I’m the CEO of Minds Matter Bay Area, which is an education nonprofit that serves low-income high school students in the Bay area. In terms of my background, I’ve been working in education for nearly 20 years, always in service of low income communities. And you know, I’ve taken quite a journey, I think through education from starting in the classroom. I first and foremost see myself as an educator. I was with Teach for America and taught middle and high school students. From there, I entered into the world of policy, have had the opportunity to also advise system level leaders like superintendents and, and, and principals on their journey to thinking about talent development in their systems.
Irene Shih (3m 1s):
So, and just before I came back to the Bay area, in this current role, I was working in state level education policy in Connecticut.
Matt Alder (3m 9s):
Fantastic stuff. And tell us a little bit more about Minds matter and the problems and issues that you are addressing. Absolutely.
Irene Shih (3m 17s):
So Minds matter, Bay area, again, we are an education nonprofit. We are in service of, you know, no low income students. And the primary problem we are solving for is something called College Undermatching. And so this is kind of a, a lesser known issue, but among low income students, you know, obviously we talk a lot about, you know, college success and getting to college, but actually a lesser known issue is that there are actually plenty of students that qualify for top colleges, more competitive colleges, and they are not able to go often because they aren’t, you know, given the guidance. They don’t necessarily see themselves as fitting into these spaces because they had, they’ve sort of taken themselves out of the running in terms of not having the confidence to apply.
Irene Shih (4m 2s):
And also, you know, largely because, you know, there, there is, you know, the process is becoming more and more of a black box. It’s becoming more and more complex in terms of how to apply to college in this country, especially to the most competitive schools. And so oftentimes not having, you know, an older brother or sister, not having, you know, a dedicated counselor at school who can really guide you through that process means that they’re, you know, even if they could qualify, they’re not, you know, able to access this wonderful opportunity. Now we care about that. And I want to go a step further to talking about why we care about college Undermatching. So, you know, there have been plenty of studies that have actually shown that one of the most, in fact the most important differentiator for low income students in terms of helping them rewrite their socioeconomic trajectory is the college and the quality of the college they go to.
Irene Shih (4m 54s):
This is far more true for low income students than it is for their higher income peers because what these students are able to get access to when they go to a competitive school is actually better networks. And of course, also better facilities, better resources. But all of these things are not necessarily things that they have growing up in the communities that they grow up in. And so being able to go to a college that that opens those doors for them is so critical. And so we think about this as taking it a step further from just saying, oh, it’s really important to help low income students who can qualify, you know, for great schools to get into these schools. It’s actually about saying once you actually get through those gates of a competitive college, it opens all of these incredible doors for you.
Irene Shih (5m 38s):
And so we wanna make sure that we, you know, help you step through that, those gates.
Matt Alder (5m 42s):
Absolutely, that makes perfect sense. Just dig in a little bit further. Tell us a little bit more about the barriers that are stopping young people from low income backgrounds, you know, getting into these colleges.
Irene Shih (5m 55s):
Yeah, absolutely. There are really three key barriers. Low-income, high achieving students are often prevented from attending top colleges because of three things. One is they are unfamiliar with options for higher education. Two, they are not provided with guidance to navigate the elite emissions process. And three, they’re often lacking in the confidence to apply to selective schools. And again, not because they are not able, they have plenty of capability to do it, but they just often don’t, you know, see themselves as that they sort of write themselves out right before, before you know that’s even true.
Matt Alder (6m 28s):
And how do you, how do you go about addressing the problem?
Irene Shih (6m 31s):
Well, our program really focuses on, you know, here’s what I will say, I’ll pull back for a moment. There are lots of different sort of mentorship programs in the Bay area and obviously around the country. I think that when I talk about us as a mentorship program, the thing I really anchor on is we are quite a boutique organization. We’re very focused on in-depth building in-depth relationships between our volunteers who service mentors and instructors and you know, counselors to our mentees. And we build that relationship over the course of many years. And so I’m gonna talk about our program for a moment, but the thing that I want us as an audience to just imagine is that all of this program is really delivered by incredibly dedicated volunteers who are on the journey with our students, not just for, you know, a semester or even a year, but actually for three years and often even longer.
Irene Shih (7m 23s):
So this, these are the components of our program. One is dedicated mentoring. So each of our students gets access to two volunteer mentors that work with them every week throughout the school year for three years in high school. The second is weekly instruction. So this is primarily, you know, s A T A C T test prep, but also as it relates to, you know, subject area knowledge. There’s also tutoring as well on some of these subject areas. And there is a component that we call summer learning. And so one thing that’s often not known to students that first come into our program is it’s really critical what you do in your, in your high school summers.
Irene Shih (8m 5s):
That’s a great opportunity to take on courses or internships or experiences that help expose you to, you know, career pathways that might be of interest to you. So what we do is we fund, we, we what we support our students to apply for, you know, college programs in their sophomore summer that help them, you know, get to college campuses, take college level coursework, but also expose them to what it feels like to live on a college campus for several weeks. Because that’s an experience that almost no one in their immediate family or community can, can necessarily tell them about. And so they get to live that firsthand. And then in their junior year summer, we support them to, you know, further their career exploration by thinking about, you know, taking on internships, you know, you know, attending, you know, multi, multi-week seminars, you know, participating in and developing their own research projects on subjects that they’re really interested in that they believe could further their career exploration.
Irene Shih (8m 60s):
And we fund these opportunities for students as well. So not only do we help them walk through the process of how to develop, you know, what it is that they want to explore in the summers, but we also make sure that they’re funded and that it’s a feasible project for them. And the last bit of what we do as a program, of course, is incredibly focused on college applications and financial aid. We have a team that is dedicated to helping our students think about every juncture of that process. So of course developing the list of schools that they want to apply to, you know, putting together the applications, really thinking through the personal statements that they craft for each of their applications. They actually get quite a bit of one-on-one support in terms of writing their personal statements.
Irene Shih (9m 41s):
And then of course, you know, moving through the multitude of, you know, different financial aid opportunities that exist and making sure that they’re putting, really putting themselves out there because, you know, our students actually end up qualifying for lots of, you know, different financial aid opportunities. But oftentimes the barrier is just not even knowing that those opportunities exist. So that team is really there to support them through that process. And of course their mentors are always there with them as well. So, I, I took a long road here to describe what we do, but again, try to just imagine that all of this is really being delivered week over week over week for several years by an incredibly dedicated team of volunteers. Most of our volunteers are also young professionals in the Bay area who have recently really lived through some of what our students have lived through.
Irene Shih (10m 26s):
So there’s a bit of a near peer effect in terms of them being able to pass or pay forward what they recently learned to our, our mentees as well.
Matt Alder (10m 36s):
And how early in high school did you start working with people?
Irene Shih (10m 40s):
Yeah, our students come in sophomore year at the start of sophomore year, and we work with them in this high school program component all the way through, you know, senior graduation, college matriculation. And then, you know, we have, we actually continue to support our alumni by making sure that they’re plugged into our network. There are plenty of career networking and, and in fact career opportunities that we expose our, our alumni to. And then, and then of course, because of the deep relationships they build throughout their time in our program, me, most of those relationships actually end up carrying on into their college and even career sort of journeys.
Matt Alder (12m 1s):
I know that one of the things that you talk about is economic connectedness. What is that and why is it so important?
Irene Shih (12m 8s):
There’s this wonderful New York Times article that came out, I wanna say six, about six or eight months ago. And it was featuring a study done by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his team. And what they were looking at was, I think something like 72 million Facebook profiles. And among those 72 million people studied about 21 billion relationships. And what they were trying to understand is what are the interventions that actually lift people out of poverty? What are the interventions that actually work best? And what was really surprising to come out of that study was that in fact, of all of the different interventions that have been tried, you know, including ones that actually are typically found to be rather useful, things like busing and school integration, which definitely has degrees of success, none of those were actually considered more effective than this one thing, which is called cross class friendships.
Irene Shih (13m 6s):
So cross class friendships meaning deep, meaningful connections formed between people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, and the more tendrils of connections that exist between someone that is from a sort of lower income family, right, with someone that has access to, you know, you know, different and, and more resources, the more likely that person of a lower income background is to, you know, be able to sort of rewrite their socioeconomic future and be able to really escape intergenerational poverty. And so this was really at the core of how we define econ, not we, but just really the idea of economic connectedness is these tendrils of connection, meaningful connection between people of different socioeconomic backgrounds.
Irene Shih (13m 57s):
And now here’s I think why this is really interesting to unpack because one of the things that this study really looked into was that it’s not enough to just kind of, for lack of better words, like smash people together, right? And say, Hey, you are, you know, here you go, you’re in the same environment together, right? Because you can’t really force friendships and that the friendships is really the piece that matters most because that’s the thing that encourages people from different backgrounds to learn from each other, to continue on their journeys for many years, not just for, you know, couple of years that they’re, you know, together physically, but actually for many years to come to carry that relationship forward and have that continue to influence their, their lives and decisions for and and access right to resources for years to come.
Irene Shih (14m 43s):
And so we think a lot about that as a mentorship program because at the heart of how we define mentorship, I started by saying, you know, really try to imagine that everything we do is really coming from this incredible foundation of dedicated volunteers who are building deep and meaningful relationships with our students. We really think that that’s important. There’s a reason we spend so much time developing and cultivating these relationships. We ensure that they have so much time to spend together in high quality ways deepening not just, you know, it’s really important to us that our program is not transactional. Yes, there are certain things that we wanna make sure we help our students do, that’s the, the programmatic part.
Irene Shih (15m 26s):
But at the core of it, all of this comes together because we care about our kids as humans and we ensure that our mentors and our instructors and all of our volunteers that are supporting students have a deep sense of that. Because the hope is that that relationship that they invest in over the three years that they’re in our high school program, it actually continues beyond our students’ time in the high school program. And it usually does because of that investment early on because, and what we believe, and I think this is kind of the neat thing, is, you know, our volunteers are, by the time they’re serving in our program, they already have access to resources and spaces that are very different from what our students have access to.
Irene Shih (16m 9s):
So they already are able to unlock, you know, levels of resources and access points for our students. But as they continue to grow, our volunteers are continuing to grow in their careers, right? And their lives and continue to build their sort of resources. So are our mentees. And the idea is that they just keep, you know, pulling each other up and influencing each other throughout their lives. That’s the true hope of economic connectedness.
Matt Alder (16m 33s):
Amazing. And tell us more about the outcomes that you are, I suppose, the specific outcomes you’re seeing from the program.
Irene Shih (16m 38s):
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, starting at a preliminary level where, where we look at, you know, just college enrollment. So first of all, a hundred percent of our students are accepted to four year colleges. Among those students, close to 80% attend the most selective colleges in the country. And a hundred percent of our students graduate from college within four years. And one more metric that I’ll just throw out there, one more I’ll throw out there is that we in recent years have actually helped our students meet a median 96% of their college costs through nonan financial aid. So financial aid that they do not have to pay back, that does not accrue debt.
Irene Shih (17m 21s):
This is all really important to us, as you can imagine, because, you know, we truly believe that for our students, it’s not just about saying, oh, get to college, that’s important. It’s actually about the doors that we believe going to these colleges and these top colleges can actually unlock for them. That’s really, really important. That combined obviously with the wonderful relationship they built with, you know, their mentors, the volunteers that supported them, we hope, you know, we’ll continue to, you know, you know, pay dividends, I think in terms of the opportunities they find in their lives.
Matt Alder (17m 52s):
And a final question for you. There are lots of people listening who heads of talent acquisition or senior, you know, senior people in in talent acquisition functions in, you know, lots of different employers and I know that many of them will care deeply about social Mobility or work for, for companies that that’s, that’s really important to what’s your, what message would you like to give them? What advice do you have? How can they help?
Irene Shih (18m 18s):
Before I answer that question full on, one thing I think is worth naming is that because our organization has such unique access points to young professionals all over the Bay area that come and volunteer with our organization, that’s hundreds every year of, of young professionals that come and, and serve here, we also have a unique sort of opportunity to ensure that the industries that our volunteers represent can be sort of put in front of our mentees, right? While they’re going through our, our high school program. And that they can see themselves as, you know, potentially, you know, working in any one of these industries, right? And actually that’s something that we capitalize on and think a lot about is how to make sure that, you know, in addition to the depth of relationships we build, we are also building bridges, right?
Irene Shih (19m 5s):
For our students who typically are, they would typically not expect to be able to find jobs right in the indu in these industries. We are really trying to build bridges for them to actually find a pathway into careers in, in a multitude of industries. You know, high, high tech, obviously biotech, you know, you know, medicine, law, all manners of careers. And so, but I would say one thing to that, right? I think one of the reasons that our mentees become so receptive, right? To this idea that, you know, hey, there are these volunteers that support me that are in this organization and you know, they’re working in all these different kind of companies and I’d wanna be curious about learning more about how to like get my foot through the door, right?
Irene Shih (19m 52s):
In one or more of these places. I think one of the reasons our students tend to be quite receptive to that is because they’ve built such a trust with the volunteers that support them. First of all, they know that there is no agenda here, right? There’s no agenda. It’s about helping you explore what’s possible for you. We’re not trying to make you take one path or another, we’re trying to expose you to all these different potential pathways, lay them, you know, at your feet and let you really think about what best fits you and, and work through a process of exploration. You can also try something and decide, that’s not for me, right? That happens with our students too, right? The right to, to explore and decide against the thing that you explored. That’s totally great.
Irene Shih (20m 32s):
That’s a part of exploration. But again, I think we are able to do that uniquely because our students trust that there is no agenda. They feel deeply every week that we are here to support them as people. There is no agenda. And we’re also here to, you know, bounce ideas off of, there’s no real wrong question to ask. I think all of that is important, I think for employers to think about because I, I do often, right? It’s not uncommon that we speak with, you know, HR departments with, you know, different sort of, you know, factions of, of companies that are interested in talent development. And one of the things that I think they ask is just like, oh, you know, how can we, you know, come in and do a quick like day of service or how can we come in and give some quick exposure right, to your students on what we do?
Irene Shih (21m 26s):
And I must say, Matt, that you know, we’re certainly open to that, but we have not found that to be the most effective way to engage our student population and really help them want to and see themselves as sort of, you know, stepping foot through the doors of some of these companies. And I think the reason for that, again, is it’s very little to accomplish any of these things without trust and without relationships. I really think that students, you know, our students like any, as you can imagine, like any kid that’s 15 or 16, there’s a level of skepticism right at first when they first come into any kind of program or organization around like, are these relationships gonna be transactional?
Irene Shih (22m 7s):
Do people have an agenda or do people really care about me as a person? And I think we spend a lot of time as a program and organization and community making sure that it never feels transactional, that it’s based in something real and that we care about them as real people. And what we hope is that companies that are interested in helping students really take the time, pick like one or two organizations to get your employees really involved in be able to spend a significant and meaningful amount of time building up relationships with the students such that it does not feel transactional, it does not feel like a box being checked and it does not feel like you’re coming in with a really transparent agenda. And I think If you can do that.
Irene Shih (22m 49s):
You’ll find that, you know, you’re more likely to, you know, organically bring on students that very much wanna be able to step through, you know, the doors of your, you know, wonderful offices, but they just need to believe that you are in it for them.
Matt Alder (23m 1s):
Irene, thank you very much talking to me.
Irene Shih (23m 4s):
Absolutely. Thank you Matt. Appreciate it.
Matt Alder (23m 7s):
My thanks to Irene. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or Via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes at Recruiting Future dot com on that site. You can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
