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Schools are increasingly engaging in career-connected learning to increase career exposure and skill development. But focusing on skills alone will fall short, particularly if schools hope to address long-standing opportunity gaps. Awareness of possible careers and access to jobs depends not only on learning and achievement, but on personal and professional relationships that serve as gateways to career opportunities. Opportunity sits at the intersection of students' human capital--what they know and can do--and their social capital--who they know and can depend on for support and access. To launch a career, students need more than skills--they also need people willing to take a bet on their potential. With the aim of helping leaders implement effective, equitable strategies for building students' social capital, this report offers field-tested considerations for piloting social capital building within existing career pathways initiatives. The observations draw from an 18-month pilot during which the authors leveraged their social capital playbook to provide direct support to a group of three intermediary organizations--Education Strategy Group, Generation Schools Network, and Hawai'i P-20--collectively supporting 20 sites in the K-12 career pathways space. In the course of the pilot, the authors sought to understand how schools and nonprofits can make social capital building an explicit, effective, and equitable component of existing career-connected learning models.

Efforts to invest in students' networks--either to bolster support or expand professional opportunities--should start with a deep understanding of and appreciation for the networks of which they are already members. Recognizing and respecting students' inherent resources and cultural wealth is what this report refers to as an asset-based approach. Luckily, a host of innovative organizations focused on more equitably building and maintaining students' social capital are doing just that. This report describes the profound potential of these organizations' approaches to mapping and mobilizing students' existing social networks, and details emerging strategies and tools that schools should consider. To surface these examples, the authors interviewed and convened program leaders from a variety of schools, nonprofits, and social enterprises. These leaders have all endeavored to help students map out, reflect on, and mobilize their existing networks in some form or fashion. Because deficit-based approaches may be more common among institutions serving low-income students, first-generation students, and students of color, the majority of the programs interviewed explicitly focus on serving students from these backgrounds, with strategies attuned to their students' racial and cultural identities. This paper explores the research behind relationship mapping and the basic tenets of building a relationship map. To illustrate how and when schools can use relationship mapping to serve a variety of short- and long-term goals, it highlights examples of current programs. Finally, it offers recommendations for furthering the vision and unlocking the potential of relationship mapping.

Alumni networks are part of the bill of goods that colleges and universities sell to students. But according to a Strada-Gallup Alumni Survey, only 9% of college graduates reported that their alumni network was helpful or very helpful in the job market. That startling statistic says a lot about how poorly most institutions actually perform when it comes to systematically connecting alumni and students in reliable, scalable ways. Endowment-supported institutions have long-held, elaborate strategies in place to "engage" alumni to mine their financial capital. But if the Strada-Gallup alumni survey is any clue, they--and their peer institutions with smaller or no endowments--could be doing more to successfully activate alumni's social capital. That social capital has immense potential to drive improvements in students' experiences while on campus, and to bolster graduates' long-term return on investment (ROI) in a degree. With the right tools and models, postsecondary institutions could enlist alumni to deliberately equip college-goers with career skills and professional networks. This report highlights innovative companies and models that are emerging to help postsecondary players harness their alumni networks in new ways, and provides an analysis of five ways that rethinking alumni connections could fulfill postsecondary education's promise. The tools and models highlighted in this paper reflect the fact that it's networks--not just degrees--that lead to jobs. Alumni networks are a critical resource as postsecondary programs look to enrich the student experience, particularly with an eye towards boosting graduates' ROI.

Social capital describes students' access to, and ability to mobilize, relationships that help them further their potential and their goals. Just like skills and knowledge, relationships offer resources that drive access to opportunity. Most schools and programs wholeheartedly agree that relationships matter. But far fewer actually measure students' social capital. Oftentimes, relationships, valuable as they may be, are treated as inputs to learning and development rather than outcomes in their own right. In turn, schools routinely leave students' access to relationships and networks to chance. To address this gap, a host of early innovators across K-12, postsecondary, and workforce development are making important strides toward purposefully building and measuring students' social capital in an effort to expand access to opportunity. Drawing on those emerging practices, this paper offers a framework for measuring social capital grounded in both research and practice.

The WISE Report from the Clayton Christensen Institute explores perspectives on the blended learning process through the institute's comprehensive surveys of the three countries. This report touches on a number of school-based efforts to implement educational technology, focusing on whether, and how, a sample of brick-and-mortar schools in Brazil, Malaysia, and South Africa use online learning to deliver content in new, more flexible ways. Without directly comparing the samples, data from surveys and case studies showed a few common themes across all three countries: (1) The need to clearly distinguish between technology-rich versus blended-learning models; (2) Innovations in online and blended learning tend grow differently in different circumstances, depending on the success metrics to which they are held; and (3) Infrastructure and human capital pose some of the greatest challenges to implementing technology in general, and blended learning in particular. [This report was co-produced by WISE (World Innovation Summit of Education), an initiative of Qatar Foundation.]

The federal government funds a significant proportion of education research in the United States. But these research efforts have, by and large, fallen short of delivering on the promise to drive individual student outcomes across the country. By altering the priorities of education research to embrace a more complete research cycle, the federal government can boost the productivity of future efforts. An effective research agenda moves beyond merely identifying correlations of what works on average to articulate and test theories about how and why certain educational interventions work in different circumstances for different students. This report discusses what is needed to do this: (1) Focus on the individual, not the average; (2) Push toward causal understanding; (3) Continue to fund research, not development; and (4) Coordinate the research cycle toward completion. The authors also discuss what is wrong with the nation's approach to research.