How Having Access to a Mentor from a Young Age has a Compound Effect
By: Rocio Del Moral
Tags: Mentorship Matters, Mentorship, College Graduate, Mentoring

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

The importance of access is often underestimated, overlooked, or ignored by both the privileged and the unprivileged. After all, we see our daily lives and circumstances as “normal” because that is our daily life experience, regardless of our footing in the world.

Often times I think and rewatch the below video. In a nutshell, the instructor asks the kids to line up to race each other for a $100 bill. Before they can start running though, he asks a series of statements. If the statement applies to the person, then they should take two steps forward; if it doesn’t, then they don’t move. It becomes pretty clear once the instructor starts saying the statements where this is going. It also becomes pretty clear to you as a viewer and to the kids themselves how privilege works in terms of socioeconomics, upbringing, and plenty of other factors, and how that can get them closer to their goals.

So what does access (or this video for that matter) have to do with mentorship? As I mentioned in my previous blog post, there is a difference in getting life achievements between those that have a mentor and those who don’t. Further, according to a recent article published on the Atlantic:

If you talk to successful people about what made a difference in their lives, “it often comes down to the involvement of a caring adult over time and during critical moments,” said the University of Massachusetts at Boston psychology professor Jean Rhodes, one of the nation’s leading experts on mentoring. Mentoring sometimes involves helping you “figure out what you want to do with your life … who are the people who will help you get there … and how do you connect with them.”

There is a number of reasons as to why a person has a mentor or not, one of them is education and socioeconomic standing — which oftentimes go hand-in-hand. According to that same article,

Not all children have equal access to these positive outcomes. According to the National Mentoring Partnership, middle-class and affluent young people often enjoy a network of family and friends serving as informal mentors and can have access to camp counselors, sports coaches, and therapists pushing them to success. About two-thirds of teens in the highest economic quartile receive some mentoring beyond their extended family, while, in contrast, only about a third of youth from the bottom economic quarter do, the organization reported in a 2013 study.

In other words, access to a mentor is mostly available to groups of people with better socioeconomic standing. Although there are plenty of non-profits that strive to extend this access to other groups such as Micromentor.org or Big Brothers, Big Sisters of America, the reality is that there is a lot of work to be done still.

This not only affects youth, it affects people of all ages. Going back to my previous article where I mention levels of education across groups in the US, if we consider the people who are first in their families to graduate college or have a bachelor’s degree, it means that they quite simply outdid their parents and grandparents in terms of the level of education. Who do they turn to for questions and guidance then?

According to Emerson Collective, about 50% of college students are first-generation. This is an outstanding number as it indicates that more and more people have access to education. However, this also comes with a high level of pressure, “especially for low-income communities where attending college is not an expectation, but an exception.” One of the students included in this article mentions, “I didn’t understand what it meant to go to a university, let alone know anyone who had achieved things like that.” It means that these folks are starting from scratch, often left to their own devices to reinvent the wheel.

This lack of access and awareness can continue throughout their professional and personal lives. First-generation college graduates can also be the first in their families to hold a corporate job. We’ve seen the difference it makes to have a mentor in the workplace vs not having one, even if employees have the same level of education. Think of a first-generation college graduate vs those whose parents, grandparents, and extended circle have a college education and take it as a normal milestone.

As time goes on, this has a compound effect. If we compare levels of education and the executives in corporations based on racial/ethnic groups in the US, we can see that representation starts to dwindle. Though there has been progress in getting more folks to attend and finish college across groups, this growth is not apples to apples in senior leadership roles. For example, as of 2016, 15% of the Hispanic/Latino in the US got a college degree, while only 4.3% of senior executives in US companies are Hispanic/Latino.

Of course, this number has a natural lag — graduating college doesn’t automatically land folks a senior executive role across the board (at least not normally). Folks have to gain experience and grow into those roles. But as we think about proportionality, we must think about other factors that influence success, which of course includes mentorship.

In the end, having access to a mentor (sooner rather than later), has a compound effect through time. As a mentee, think about the things you want to achieve in life and look for more experienced folks to help you navigate those questions. To help out as a mentor and giving more folks access to a mentor, I encourage you to enroll as a mentor at your company, community, or an online non-profit. I have done it and not only does this help give access to more folks, but it also has a very rewarding feeling and learning opportunity as a mentor.