Julia Freeland Fisher and Matthew O. Jackson on Who You Know and The Human Network
Julia Freeland Fisher, director of education research at the Clayton Christensen Institute, is the author of Who You Know: Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students' Networks. Matthew O. Jackson, Trione Chair of the Department of Economics and William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, wrote The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors. Freeland Fisher and Jackson discussed their books with Mallika Vinekar, director of the Office of Digital Education at Vanderbilt University, in a conversation that took place May 10, 2023, as part of the Academic Innovation for the Public Good book series. Here are the video and transcript of the event.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited; introductory and closing remarks from the live event have been removed.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: I feel so privileged to be joined by not just one but two very talented authors for this conversation today. Matthew and Julia, thank you both so much for being here.
Both of you bring such wealth of expertise and perspective in a topic that I think is increasingly important but sometimes overlooked in the education space: this idea that social networks are really deeply powerful and play an integral role in shaping social dynamics and outcomes. I think it's something we really need to actively discuss in the context of education. So I'm really looking forward to this dialogue today.
So I'll just very quickly set the stage here, and then I'm excited to dive into the meat of our discussion. So Matthew, in your book, The Human Network, you really do such a great job of helping us understand why networks form and how the qualities of networks determine our opinions, our behaviors, our beliefs. They really show up in our daily lives. And then Julia, in Who You Know, you so effectively highlight the social side of opportunity, underscoring this need for K-12 to play a greater role in expanding student networks through the use of really disruptive innovations we're seeing in technology.
And so I had so much fun reading these books because I think they dovetail so nicely with one another and, through different lenses, really give us this very holistic understanding of how and why networks are so important as we think about advancing social mobility and equality. And so I'm really thrilled to have this opportunity to unpack the insights in your fantastic books today and really discuss what they mean for the future of education and innovation.
So I'd love to start our conversation by actually just taking a step back and learning more about you two as authors and as humans. We'd love to learn a little bit more about what motivated each of you to pursue research and writing focused on the power of social networks and human networks. And Matthew, let's start with you.
MATTHEW O. JACKSON: Sure. Thanks, Mallika. For me, it was a bit of an accident. As an economist, there's lots of reasons to be interested in social networks because, as you mentioned, they affect our opportunities, whether we have access to jobs, whether we have friends that work in certain places that can help get us interviews, what our beliefs are, what our norms are, which products we're buying. So it's very pervasive.
The way I got started was just a chance conversation with a friend at lunch where we were talking about what made people influential and started thinking about social capital. And we dug a lot into the literature on social networks and realized that there were a lot of interactions between what was being studied there and economics that hadn't really been explored that deeply. And so understanding and putting a lot of economics in this social context makes a big difference.
For instance, understanding whether people are going to do well after university depends not only on what they learned, but what was their friend, who were their friends when they were in university, and what kind of support network did they have, and what's going forward. So it really fits very well for lots of economic questions. And I just find it fascinating.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Yeah. I love that. And I think that's something you really unpack in your book. I'd love to hear from you, Julia. What's your story here?
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Yeah. Thanks, Mallika, and thanks, everyone, for joining. So I started my career out at a venture philanthropy firm called NewSchools Venture Fund out in San Francisco in an era when education entrepreneurship was really exciting, when edtech had yet to be a category. It was just coming onto the scene, like Sal Khan was in a basement somewhere, making YouTube videos.
And it was an era of reform both in K-12 and I'd argue, in higher ed that was very focused on, in K-12, achievement gaps and college access, and in higher ed, paying a lot of attention to that access conversation, little less so to college success and really increasing graduation rates. And at the same time that I was getting a baptism by fire in that ed reform conversation, I was myself entering the world of work in the knowledge economy and seeing how networks were everywhere.
And I'm the child of two introverts and an introvert myself, so it was kind of a shock to the system to see just how prevalent networks were in terms of who was getting what, who had power, how deals got done, et cetera. And it felt like such a stark disconnect from the conversation about what young people needed to succeed and thrive and get ahead.
And so I wanted to start to understand, in this emergent field of education innovation, who was paying attention, not just to networks, but to this concept of social capital — the resources that are contained in our networks that may be latent in our networks, if they're not being mobilized or maybe out of reach because we don't know people in certain networks. So that's what I started studying.
The book — I cringe talking about the book because it came out five years ago, and that feels like 500 years ago in many ways in this day and age. The book really focuses on K-12. But since it came out in 2018, I've actually spent a lot of time looking across K-12, higher ed, and the workforce because this shows up, as Matt was alluding to, across basically every domain because we are human beings and social creatures.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Exactly. Yeah. So let's talk about that more. I think at the core of both of your books is really this fundamental paradox, this idea that we are living in an increasingly connected world with really dense networks. But at the same time, we're experiencing greater divide and polarization than ever before.
And so Matthew, in your book I think you really do such a great job of helping us understand what are those key forces that are driving a world of greater connectivity and divide in so many contexts. And what does that specifically mean for access to education opportunity and social mobility? So can you just share a little bit more about how you frame that in your book?
MATTHEW O. JACKSON: Sure. So I think one thing that's happening very rapidly is that we are able to use technology to be in minute by minute, second by second, contact with each other around the globe. You can be in touch with people that you haven't seen in many years, so you can keep networks alive for longer periods of time. It's easier to maintain relationships that might have gone dormant otherwise. You can reach out to people at greater distances.
It's easier to find the information. So on one level, we have incredible amounts of connectivity. We're able to get courses we couldn't have gotten before that are online. Now we're able to access materials and learn things that we weren't able to. We can find out information about different people. So that is very empowering.
And then the counterbalancing force is that as humans, we actually have this tendency to really associate with other people who have similar views, who have similar backgrounds. And search engines make it possible for us to find certain kinds of material that resonates with us and that reinforces our views and confirms what we're thinking.
So on the one hand, we've got these many different technologies which are enabling us to connect at greater levels and distances and maintain relationships. But we also have greater selectivity where we can choose what we're listening to, what we're paying attention to, who we're connecting with.
For instance, if on various social platforms when they suggest new people for me to meet, they're not suggesting people who are very different from me. They can look and say, oh, here's Matt's twin who actually, a clone who lives in another place that Matt is not aware of. Let's connect those two.
Or here's somebody who's actually friends with hundreds of your current friends. Why don't you form friends with them? So I'm not reaching out of my normal social circle in that way. I'm not broadening my network. In fact, they could be making it more insular and more selective in terms of what we see.
And so it's a very strange world that we're living in, where you've got two very different forces at the same time that are both influencing our networks in ways that are hard to predict going forward. Which will win out? It's not obvious.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Right. So in many ways, it's really reinforcing these sub-communities that we live in. I'm curious, Julia, from your perspective because you talk about this in the context of education, specifically at the K-12 level. You really argue that the focus on building social capital and networks needs to happen early on before students enter the higher ed system, which I think today, in many ways, higher ed is seen as the gateway to the networks.
Can you help us understand a little bit more how you think about the role of K-12 in strengthening student networks, and therefore expanding access to opportunity? And how do you see schools really needing to reimagine themselves to do that?
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Yeah, totally. And I focused on K-12 partly because that was where I started my career, but partly just from a moral, ethical, and equity lens. If we don't start this earlier, then obviously there are many, many obstacles to college for students who may not have as deep a pocket, may not have parents who have gone to college. And so if we don't start this earlier, I just worry that college becomes an accelerant of inequality as opposed to a cure for it. So that's part of the reason that I really focused on K-12 as an institution that could do something.
Just a quick empirical point here, and then I'll give some practical examples of what we suggest K-12 could do. First off, we really advocate an increasingly, since the book came out, for K-12 systems to bring networks into daylight and think about social network data alongside academic data. And that's why, for those who haven't read Matt's book, social network analysis is like the closest thing to an economist doing a magic trick, like it's incredible what you learn when you actually pull back the curtain on social networks in general. And I think there's just a huge runway for innovation to look at this in the context of school. So that's a first point.
Second empirical point — there's a researcher named Mario Luis Small that really informed how we framed the opportunity in the book. Mario Luis Small is a sociologist who, among other things, has really focused on how institutions operate as brokers of social capital. So historically, a lot of the social capital literature early on sometimes looked at social capital very much as an inherited asset class, so really, as the family unit.
Others like Putnam thought about it at the community level, but in vague ways where you would walk out the door and maybe you were a member of the Rotary Club, and that was where you got your social capital. But Mario Luis Small really looked at all institutions are actually brokers of social capital. But oftentimes, they are not doing that in a particularly purposeful way. He studied initially in the book, Unanticipated Gains, where he made this theoretical point. He was looking at daycare centers, which is particularly close to my heart in my current phase of parenting where parents are meeting one another at drop-off and pick-up.
But there may not be other institutional norms that are creating communities at those daycare centers. So that is a really important point to think about. All of our institutions are brokers of social capital, and that is, therefore, a design opportunity to get really deliberate and data-driven and potentially more equitable.
Pragmatically for schools, the reason why this is so important is that early exposure, who students know, deeply shapes their sense of future possible selves, who they are exposed to, from even as early as middle school onwards. In addition to which, we know that tight-knit, what researcher Jon Zaff calls webs of support, are a key predictor to persistence and not dropping out. In addition to which developmental relationships, which comes out of the youth development research, shapes everything from grades to lower incidence of risky behaviors.
So relationships are everywhere, and, in some ways, as a result they are nowhere. No one is seeing, taking ownership of, are our students deepening and expanding and diversifying their networks over the course of their education in ways that are going to help them get by and get ahead?
So that's really the thesis of the opportunity in front of K-12, which again, in 2023 is a hard conversation to have because, like higher ed as well, K-12 systems are just so at capacity and the ability to innovate right now feels limited. So we can talk about what that means pragmatically.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Yeah. And I'm curious, as you talk about different institutions being brokers of social capital, let's bring it back to higher ed. How can higher ed be a more intentional broker of social capital? I'm curious for both your perspectives here.
MATTHEW O. JACKSON: I think one thing is just, as Julia was alluding to, being aware that they're brokers of social capital, so first of all, just realizing how important the social structure within the institution is for students' outcomes. And I think this is especially important for large institutions because large institutions, it's easy to say, look, we look really diverse on paper. So we have a very diverse student body and we're doing all kinds of things.
But then when you actually look internally, the network that you see can be eye-opening in terms of how segregated it is and how the network structure does not at all reflect the diversity that's there on paper. It could be that some students have no support networks. Others have limited support networks. Some have lots of connections across lines, other people don't.
It's very easy for large institutions to end up having people not even be in much contact with each other within that institution. And so the way that the institution is set up — the way that we set up courses, the way that we set up curricula, do we have tracking. So if you're in a high school and you have lots of tracks, that makes a difference as to which students are interacting with which students.
And if you want to make sure that students have a chance to meet each other, you might have to put in courses that aren't all tracked — honors versus non-honors. So just thinking carefully about who's in contact with whom, who has which opportunities to meet other students, how is that going to affect their life, what's their support network look like.
Are we just putting people in giant dormitories, if we're a university? Are we just leaving them to themselves? How is life structured? Those things can be as important, if not more important for, as Julia was saying, whether students complete things, how well supported they feel, and then in their lifelong journey, who their friends are and who they can keep in touch with and can help them out in finding jobs and negotiating the world at large.
So realizing that those are all important and concentrating on that, you have to take ownership of it. And I think it's really important for universities to realize that, and high schools as well, we're all, whether we like it or not, making decisions that are impacting those relationships and understanding that's important.
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Yeah.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Yeah.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
No, please.
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Oh, no. I just would echo — when I wrote this book and started writing more about social capital across both K-12 and higher ed, I was excited about the strategies, the innovation. I have found that a large part of my day job, as just like an advocate in this space, is saying "social capital matters" 900 times a day. So what Matt is saying is the day-to-day work of someone that is trying to help education systems change.
Can I just give four — I'll go lightning round, but four examples of what we think institutions who decide that social capital indeed exists and matters can do, because I think we're seeing some really promising strategies emerge. The first is actually getting more precise about the networks that students already have, and this is particularly in the climate of trying to promote equitable practices. There can be an inadvertent or maybe more insidious deficit-based thinking that our first-gen students don't have networks.
And in fact, what the research suggests is that first-gen students have deep wells of emotional support hailing from their families and communities. They may not have what you would call instrumental support, people who have the college know-how to navigate a college campus. But dismissing that emotional support is a huge misstep in the first place when it comes to helping students persist.
Second and related to that, we have research from folks like Tony Jack at Harvard who wrote a book called Privileged Poor that really tells us demographics aren't destiny when it comes to social networks. He found a very stark divide between students from low-income households who had attended private high schools versus large public comprehensive high schools who arrived on campus with very different stocks of both social and cultural capital and navigated systems very differently. So if we don't understand who students already know, we're going to design interventions that are blunt force, and either ignore their existing assets or treat all students from a certain demographic class as the same.
And lastly, some data suggests — this is work we're doing right now in high schools, but looking at who students are turning to for career advice, students may be sitting on largely undercapitalized networks. So they may know people, but not actually be asking them things about their future possibilities or internship opportunities, and the like. Those people, though, are people that students already know and trust and may actually be more inclined to help them. So again, existing networks are like a huge first step of taking stock to who your students know.
The second is really leaning into helping students join, affiliate on campus. There's a researcher named Joe Ferrare at University of Washington Bothell campus who's identified something called the snowball effect. He, like Matt, uses social network analysis to understand how first-gen students are accessing resources on campus. And if students joined a club or a cocurricular, they were highly likely to then meet additional people, access more resources, and that cycle continued. So social capital begets social capital.
But there are inhibitors to joining — if you're working many jobs, if you're commuting to campus, if you are experiencing overt racism. And lastly, the last deterrent he identified was organizational overload. If you're getting 900 emails from all these different departments at your school, you get analysis paralysis and may be less likely to join.
Last thing I'll say — and then maybe we can talk about alumni later — but making network building credit-bearing is another huge opportunity. So this can mean for everything from faculty integrating outside guest speakers, et cetera, into their coursework so that students are growing their networks in the course of doing their traditional academic course load.
Or alternatively, you have models like Braven, which is a nonprofit that partners with institutions of higher ed to offer a credit-bearing course in essentially career preparation, but that's introducing students to mentors and diverse weak-tie professional networks in the course of that course. So otherwise, we're asking students to do this on their own time. And again, that raises real equity red flags if you're talking about commuter students and/or students working multiple jobs while attending school.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: That's great. I love hearing these really actionable strategies. And I think for me, they're so compelling and it's clear that networks are so core to social outcomes and educational outcomes. But as educators, as administrators, how do we actually go about measuring this? I think that's where it can become a little overwhelming and murky. So I'd love to hear from both of you. How do you encourage us to think about actually measuring networks in this capacity?
MATTHEW O. JACKSON: We've actually been doing that. We have a couple of studies, one at Caltech where we actually tracked students over time, so over four years, and measured their networks by asking them who they were friends with, who they were studying with. We tracked information about their preferences and their decisions, and we could see how their interactions depended on who they were friends with and how that evolved over time. So you can actually just go into it.
Stanford — we have something called the Stanford Communities Project with Jamil Zaki — he's a psychologist — Gabby Harari, a team. We've been tracking students now since 2017. We tracked them through COVID. You can actually measure the networks, and you can find out a lot about whose networks look strong, how that affects their well-being. Are they lonely? Do they feel supported? Do they feel connected to the university?
Ultimately, we're hoping to be able to track them post-Stanford and see how their trajectories outside of Stanford depend on what their networks or support networks look like at Stanford.
So these are things that are relatively cheap to measure and to understand. And then you can begin to see patterns that emerge and how our first-generation students, how their networks differ from non-first-generation students, how did freshmen networks differ from sophomore networks. So frosh and sophomores and juniors have different networks. And you can begin to see all that, and you can see how it depends on the structure of your university.
Different dormitories have different patterns. Understanding whether all-frosh dorms look different than dorms where you're mixing them with upperclassmen — these are things you can measure pretty easily. It's not that difficult, and it's not that expensive. So it's something that universities can collect and understand.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Yeah. That's very encouraging. Julia, is there anything you want to add there?
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Yeah. I'll just say, I can come at the measurement question from a completely different angle because I don't have Matt's expertise. In addition to just me yelling "social capital matters every day," [LAUGHS] the most common question I get in the field is, OK, fine, but how do we measure it? Which is often language for an excuse to ignore it.
So with that in mind, we put out a paper in 2020 that I'll link to in the chat called "The Missing Metrics," where we came ground up and looked at what are largely nonprofit organizations in the field like Braven, who I just mentioned — what are organizations that are treating social capital as a programmatic outcome? What are they measuring?
And it may not be validated measures yet. Again, that's a practical measurement lens of what is the program's research evaluation team choosing to measure versus somewhat at a top-tier research university. But it gives you a clue as to the dimensions that people are paying attention to.
And the only thing I'd name that I think gets underindexed sometimes is not just universities seeking to understand who do their students know and associate with, but how confident are students mobilizing their networks because that can really be a determinant to the degree to which that network is in benefiting them, is helping them to accomplish their near-term goals, but also long-term is paying off.
And so organizations are starting to get under the hood of how confident, how comfortable are you, either through questions about students' attitudes, which I'm not a huge fan of because I think you don't get great data from that, but also just asking about behaviors. In the last three months, have you reached out to an alumni about your field of interest? Questions like that. So it's a very different tack than what I think Matthew is talking about, but is another way that organizations are tackling the murky waters of measuring social capital.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: That's great. I think both of you alluded to this in our conversation, but I want to bring us to this idea that you both highlight in your books around homophily and, really, the tendency to gravitate to people who are similar to us as a key element of human networks, and I think one that we should certainly consider as we look to address issues around social mobility and inequality.
So can you talk more about how we can overcome the negative effects of homophily? And how do we more effectively build bridges across different kinds of groups and communities within higher ed and potentially in other environments as well?
MATTHEW O. JACKSON: I can say a little bit about this. We've been doing a recent study with Facebook data, and actually, we released this, which has measures of social capital within each high school and college of a minimal size in the US. I'll put the website in the chat.
But you can begin to look at how well connected people are, for instance, across economic classes. So if you're relatively poor and you're going to a university, how many of your connections are to relatively better off people? That turns out to be an important predictor of people's outcomes. So the kind of homophily in terms of class homophily, it's going to be influenced by two major things.
One is who you actually in contact with, and then what's the proclivity that people have to actually form friendships or relationships once they're in contact. So if you're a university that has almost entirely wealthy people, then the few poor people who get in there are going to be forming ties with people who might have information that they've never had and it enriches their networks. But you're not enriching many people in terms of expanding their networks, and so forth.
So you need to put people in contact with each other, and then you need to make sure that they're actually in contact with each other in ways that can foster those relationships. And that means not just having large universities with where people just choose whatever they want to do and move around classes and dormitories and are self-selecting into smaller groups. You need to have something which encourages those kinds of connections.
There's benefits to homophily. There's reasons that people seek out other people that have the same preferences. If I want to ask somebody about what bike I should buy, I want to talk to another person who loves to cycle. And so I want people who have my same interests and background. That's great for many things.
But it's not wonderful for figuring out how I can enrich my life by undertaking new opportunities or figuring out, if I'm a kid in a poor high school, how do I get to university, how do I get a degree, what things are available to me. So forming those relationships across lines that normally wouldn't form is very difficult, but it means you have to be conscious of who's in contact with whom, and then what opportunities they're really going to have to form lasting relationships when they're in contact with each other.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: And so Julia, in your book, you do argue that the dimensions on which we sort and gravitate to one another, they're not fixed. And so I'm curious, what kinds of innovations have you seen really leverage homophily in a positive way to build trust and a sense of belonging while expanding the diversity of student networks that Matt alluded to?
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Yeah. When I was first digging into this literature and came across the concept of homophily, I was like, well, that's it. It can feel very fatalistic to say similarity breeds connection because as you're saying, Mallika, it explains all the ways in which we have segregated our society on a bunch of different dimensions.
But when you dig into the General Social Survey, which looks at America, like a representative sample of American self-reported confidant networks, which are those closest that we turn to, what you see is that certain dimensions have become less relevant over the years and other dimensions more relevant. And education level is more relevant. Religion and gender are less relevant.
So you're seeing more friendship across different genders, more friendships across different religions — sorry, less friendship across different — I'm mixing this, but you get the gist. The gender is less salient. Religion is less salient. Education is more salient. So what that tells you is that we don't need to quite just give in to how people look, their income level, or where they grew up, are these permanent fixtures in how networks are going to shape over time.
Homophily at its core is the idea that similarity breeds trust. So the question then becomes, Mallika, pragmatically how do you — I don't like the word engineer, but we're talking about how do you engineer opportunities for people to discover perhaps hidden similarities that transcend those more visible or currently salient dimensions?
The other reason I'm really passionate about this is that I am both the product of and currently a participant in a bipartisan marriage, which just seems insane in 2023. And so I am living the ability to connect across what feels like a very big difference in our culture.
So one organization that I'd highlight is a group called Climb Hire out of the Bay Area. They are focused on helping both non-college degree holders and college degree holders break into upwardly mobile jobs. And they actually teach homophily as a concept to their participants as they are gearing up to introduce their participants to middle- and upper-class professionals who may help them break through the job market.
So they're saying to them, when you are going into informational interviews, understand that building trust is actually — there is a science behind it, and that if you can find common ground with people, not only is it going to be a more pleasant conversation but that actually begins to build the foundation of a relationship. So that's one thing, organizations that have decided to be really explicit about this.
Another thing, though, is really anchoring on interest-based approaches. So one of the high schools we talk about in the book is Big Picture Learning. It's a network of high schools where students learn through internships three days a week, and they are very bullish on those internships being anchored on students' interests. What that means is that students are entering into workplaces where perhaps they didn't know people, but they do have a shared interest with the supervisors they're working with. And that again becomes the seed of trust building.
The last thing I'll say is that there's a growing literature on the power of near peers as credible messengers. And I think that goes underappreciated, but that is homophily in some ways in action. A near peer is someone you perceive to be similar to you because they are, in fact, close in age or experience to you. And that's another example of a strategy that I think more institutions can take advantage of. Does that makes sense?
MALLIKA VINEKAR: That makes a lot of sense. So we're actually going to be shifting to the Q&A portion from the audience at this point. So I'll start going through some questions we're getting from our viewers here. We have one question around, "Are there any metrics on student-faculty networks in undergraduate studies and the effect on graduate study outcomes?"
MATTHEW O. JACKSON: I don't know of much that's been looking at the actual interaction between students and faculty, but there are — so there there's some studies at graduate student levels. So Aaron Clauset at the University of Colorado has been studying where people did their graduate work and who their graduate advisors are, and then what their trajectories look like post PhD. So there's something at higher levels.
But I think in general of teacher-student interactions and something — I don't know that much about the literature explicitly on that, but it's another important set of relationships obviously.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Yeah. OK. Julia?
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Oh, yeah. I'll try and put it in the chat. There is some. Strada is a national education organization/investment organization that has done some survey work and has looked at who students are turning to for mentorship on campus to understand, are students from different backgrounds more or less likely to enlist faculty or other university staff.
So first-generation students and students of color are actually less likely to be building relationships with faculty than — mentoring relationships, I should say, with faculty — than their white and continuing-generation counterparts. So that's one tiny data point, but not so much the kind of research we need as a field to understand how might we overcome those gaps.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: So on the topic of mentoring, there's a question here. What is the challenge or pitfall of virtual networking and mentoring as we are looking on how we can use, or as we're looking at how we can use virtual networking to support rural high school students distributed across our state?
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Yeah. So I'll just give — so when I started researching, we haven't talked a ton about technology, but one of the first things I did trying to look at this field was try to document any and all technology tool that was putting new relationships within reach for students and started talking about that to colleagues in the field. And I went to a mentoring conference, where I essentially was laughed off the stage — not that there was a big stage with a bunch of people in the audience. But I was talking essentially about the competitive advantage of technology to diversify what sociologists call weak-tie connections. So rather than — and we can all relate to this on the heels of the pandemic.
No one wants to have a Zoom Thanksgiving again. That is a deeply impoverished experience. Let's spend time with our strong ties in person. And I think where the word mentor can get us caught up is that if you're thinking about the Cadillac of relationships, of course you want to have an in-person component. There's even, the chemistry is different when you are in person. The biology is different when you're in person.
However, what I think we've underindexed on is what Mark Granovetter, back in the 70s, dubbed "the strength of weak ties" which is that not every relationship has to be deep and strong to actually lend new resources to students. And so what we advise is that if you're looking for a sort of online play to not look at that as a surrogate for strong ties or deep, enduring mentoring relationships, but to rather think about it as a way to diversify students' weak ties and think about the metrics of success being our students gaining new perspectives, new information, broadening their horizons, not our students forming lifelong caring relationships.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Yeah. Exactly. So we have another question here. I appreciate this — Yuri says, I appreciate Julia's dislike of the term "engineering" when thinking of solutions for this problem, which is situated in a complex human system. So what strategies do you think align well with complexity science, and what would be your advice for innovators looking at network effects?
MATTHEW O. JACKSON: I can say one. So engineering, I think Julia's properly worried about social engineering. And part of the reason is that it has a lot of effects that go beyond whatever intervention we have. So if you offer a new program, you do something in a certain place, people end up rewiring their networks. And I can give you one example.
We did a study in southern India where we partnered with a bank that was going in to give loans to poor families. And it ended up that the availability of these loans changed the need for families to be interacting with other families that they normally borrowed and lent with, but it also destroyed a bunch of advice networks and other kinds of networks.
And so you saw in the villages that they introduced the loan programs, you saw that the people who weren't getting loans were losing social capital in terms of valuable advice networks and other kinds of things. And so that just means that when you go in and try to influence networks, it can have a lot of unintended consequences. It doesn't mean that loan programs are bad or something. But it means that you have to have a more holistic approach, and you have to understand that there might be a lot of implications in terms of who's going to end up maintaining relationships, what are those relationships going to look like.
And so it's tricky to know what are all the implications of some kind of intervention where we're trying to forge new relationships. And it's not always as easy to predict as we might imagine. So it's just a caution. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to improve people's lives, but it means we have to understand that there can be unintended consequences that could be substantial.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: We have to be careful in that arena. Julia, anything to add there?
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Yeah. One thing that's coming up in our work again — we're more focused on the high school space right now. But one counter — it's a different altitude than what Matt's referring to from the shape of people's networks change. But I think we've come to appreciate the importance of interventions having at their foundation agency of the participants to actually choose and navigate networks in alignment with their own goals and values as opposed to networking being done to students.
And what we've found has been tricky about really embedding, taking that theoretical concept of agency into practice, is that there isn't a really rich culture of goal setting, of individual goal setting and purpose exploration within education right now. I think some people are great at it. Some people are, but it's not routinized enough.
And so the ability to actually instill this idea, that networking is happening in alignment with your goals, versus in a vacuum where all these unintended consequences might occur. I think that's something that, if I were more entrepreneurial, I'd be trying to build a goal setting app with networking wrapped around it versus like a networking app, if that makes sense.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Yeah. I really like that. So we have another question here that gets back to this idea of students in rural and underserved areas. So what are the tips for students who are underprivileged and live in rural areas? What are effective ways they can begin to really build their social capital?
MATTHEW O. JACKSON: Just to echo what Julia said earlier, I think one thing is having an ability to activate weak ties, or be aware that there are weak ties out there and not be afraid to reach out to people. I think one thing that is clear from a variety of different studies is that people tend to underestimate the strength of their networks and the breadth of their networks and reaching out to people who would actually be willing to help them, and not necessarily understanding that it's there and it's something they can take advantage of.
So being aware that the network matters a lot is one aspect. And the second is actually not being afraid to reach out to people and ask for help and ask for questions. And try to navigate as best they can what they do have but also branching out. It's not easy for somebody in a rural high school that's relatively isolated and doesn't have many — but even finding out who did go to college, where did they go to college, what was their experience like, talking to people.
People are very happy to help most times. And it's something that we underappreciate, I think, is how many people are willing to give support that are out there.
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Yeah. I think what we've seen — we're doing some work in rural Colorado right now. And there's actually a tension in rural work, I think, across the board in America, but I can really only speak to this project. It's twofold. It's one, that schools are not always really steeped in asset-based approaches, so an understanding of what expertise and wealth and knowledge exist in the community may not have been fully fleshed out. So to Matt's point, there may be latent expertise before we declare rural communities as devoid of social capital.
But I think the second — and within that vein, districts and institutions of higher ed in rural areas I don't think are seen. They're often some of the largest employers, but they actually often employ like accountants and lawyers and people from a variety of industries. But we don't always appreciate that those different industries are represented inside an education institution. So that's one.
At the same time, there's a very clear tension with — oftentimes people that may be initiating career pathways, initiatives, et cetera, in rural areas are really worried about brain drain. And so I have literally had people say to me, we don't want our students Zoom chatting with someone who works on Wall Street. That's not the goal. And so that tension — I'm just describing it, I'm not here to tell rural communities what to do, but being aware that — I think communities need to have a conversation about both their assets and the boundaries of their existing networks, and whether they want students to be able to fly away and come back, and what have you.
Last thing I'll say is there's two colleges in Colorado as well right now — Fort Collins, which serves a large population of Native American students, and Colorado Mesa, who are doing a pilot program this year trying to create a leadership program focused on building student social capital and are then having students work with one another across those two universities. So that's another interesting experiment in similarly situated education institutions and rural communities trying to work together.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Yeah. That's really interesting. Julia, I think this next question is for you. Looking into K-12, is there a specific grade level where student interest in building networks is particularly strong, just given emotional and academic readiness? Has there any work been done to identify that specific grade?
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Yeah. I'd be curious about how far down you've gone into school. So you said high school level. I will admit, most of our work is the high school level — we're doing some in middle school right now that's really anchored on career exposure. That's a pretty narrow lane.
What I think, to just open the aperture a little bit here, though, is thinking about — even elementary school, but certainly in middle school — out-of-school activities or enrichment activities as a core place where young people are forming networks with non-family adults. And that's something we keep an eye on because if you look at the data, adolescents from high-income households are far more likely to be maintaining relationships with non-family adults than their lower-income peers. And you can almost track that exactly to enrichment spending gaps, that you can essentially buy access to coaches and mentors, et cetera, through the myriad enrichment activities that higher-income students are often participating in.
So I think networks — the term can make us think in this very literal way about professional networks and the narrow horizons versus who are the adults that young people know and are in relationship with. So in that sense, I think this can go all the way back, but our own work has focused much more at adolescence onwards.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: OK. So I actually want to bring us to a topic I'm particularly excited about in terms of the innovations we're seeing in technology and the future of emerging technologies. Both of your books are from roughly four to five years ago, and this is just such a dynamic space where there's been so much advancement already.
And so in both your books, you really highlight that divided networks limit access to information, which ultimately, of course, leads to education and job outcome disparities. And I'm curious how you're thinking about emerging technologies we're seeing now.
Generative AI is the hot topic. But there are so many others, too, and I'm curious how you're thinking about how that will impact the role of networks on social mobility and access to information and education. Matt, you want to start?
MATTHEW O. JACKSON: Sure. So I actually, in 2012 when online education was suddenly making a burst, we all got incredibly excited about it. And I was having lunch with Yoav Shoham and we ended up doing a course on game theory and posting it on the web. Now I think it's had almost a million people take the course over the decade.
And the interesting thing about that was that's a course that's not offered in many high schools and universities, and yet was suddenly available to people around the world. And you get these incredibly passionate emails thanking us for putting this on the web, and so forth.
So on one hand, I was thinking, wow, this is revolutionary. It's really going to change the way education is done. And a lot of people were talking at that time how universities, brick and mortar was going to be a thing of the past and instead we'd be seeing online education take over, and so forth.
It's very hard to predict how these things happen. It has made a difference, and it makes things certain things available to people at much greater distances. But it hasn't fundamentally changed higher education in the decade so far. It will be interesting to see how it goes forward.
Now things like ChatGPT and these are having a big impact on what kinds of things people are assigning in their courses. But how it will change the fundamental structure of education, I think it's so new and there's so many things happening so quickly, it's very difficult to see.
But certainly, the idea that we need one-on-one kinds of teaching or one instructor in front of small classes, that's true in some situations and not in others. And exactly how stuff is going to be delivered — there's an incredible amount of studies that are being done right now as to how people can learn different subjects differently depending on whether it's online, whether they're interacting with a human, whether they're reacting with other students, how they're doing problem sets and exercises.
So I think education is going to be changed pretty dramatically by these new technologies. But it might take more time than we anticipate. It's maybe not overnight the way we might have thought of.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Yeah. Julia, in your book, in terms of how we think about online education and the role it plays, you talk about the relationship between innovations in learning and innovations in connecting and how they can bolster one another. So can you talk a little bit more about that and how you've seen it play out?
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Yeah. I mean I think that part of the excitement. And Clay Christensen — he's unfortunately passed away but I work at an organization he founded 15 years ago. And he was like, Matt, one of those people who was like, and education is going to be fully disrupted by now. And obviously, that hasn't fully played out, although what we're seeing is that the fastest-scaling higher ed providers are indeed online.
So I think that's the place that the market is. It's less apparent to existing institutions than incumbents, but it's still growing at a pretty rapid clip. But given that I come at this work from the social capital lens, I think that online providers, by and large, have totally ignored the social side of opportunity. The thesis at the core of that has been, we can deliver content and hopefully teach and verify skills much faster.
And the irony to me is that both those folks and a lot of the champions of AI right now are deeply steeped in well-resourced networks and yet are often ignoring that side of who gets what and why in the potential that they see in these tools. So if you think about social capital as relationships plus resources, I think what you're saying, Mallika, is that AI has a huge opportunity to flood the resources zone. So do we actually not need relationships as much?
And my caution there is that I always think about networks almost like a stock portfolio. We can't predict the future so we should diversify our networks. And if we really index on these resources through generative AI, we will routinely underinvest in diversifying networks, particularly for people who might benefit from them most because we'll be solving on a point solution basis, information, and content gaps.
So I'm honestly most excited about a tiny minority of organizations that are really clear on AI boosting access to human interaction. One really cool example is a company called Protopia. We haven't talked about alumni networks at all, but that's a whole other piece of the higher ed equation.
So Protopia looked at the fact that alumni networks are hugely undercapitalized. On average 9% of graduates say their alumni network was helpful. It goes up to around 18% for more selective institutions, but that's still a lot of latent social capital just sitting there that was sold as part of the bill of goods in tuition dollars.
And so Protopia essentially is, it looks — I'm not going to use the right AI verbs because, obviously, we're at the frontier of my ability to talk about this. But it essentially scans through alumni databases and students can ask a question. It's actually embedded into university interfaces.
It's a white label tool. Students can ask a question, and the tool will look for who in the alumni network is best positioned to answer that question. Send them an email. If they don't answer within 24 hours, it goes to the next-best person in the alumni network. So it's literally a tool that is capitalizing a network. And that to me is super exciting, but is one of a bazillion tools that are more — I think we're going to see a lot more like nudges and virtual tutors and stuff like that I think can be helpful, but are not actually going to fully level the playing field.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Yeah. That's very cool. I have not heard of them, and we'll definitely look more into that.
So I want to wrap by actually just looking ahead and thinking about what all of this means in the future, in the context of future of learning and work. Given the pace of technological advancement that we've discussed, given an increasingly global workforce, what role do you see networks playing in the future of learning and work, and what does that mean for the education industry? Julia, do you want to kick that one off?
JULIA FREELAND FISHER: Yeah. I'll say that I think something tricky — just thinking of the audience for this — something tricky in education and workforce is that we know from the research that relationships are both a context for learning. Like a crucial context for learning, that learning is relational. But we also know, even though we only talked about it, that networks are a currency alongside skills in the opportunity equation.
And I actually think that is confusing if you are trying to innovate towards the future because it can leave you not quite knowing, where to prioritize relationships and networks within whatever you're betting on next. So that's not an answer. I'm not making some giant prediction when I say that.
The only other thing that I think is interesting and playing out in both education and workforce context right now is that I think some organizations are seeing their business model and their role as being brokers, and others are seeing themselves as skill builders. And in the skill builders bucket, like I said, around confidence at the beginning of the talk, there's a set of skills around building, maintaining, forging networks, connecting across differences that I think could be integrated more deliberately into those skill-building models.
I think the bigger question I'm looking at is what are the business models that are going to prop up the brokers, because it's those access points that are going to be really transformational when it comes to addressing inequality.
MATTHEW O. JACKSON: Just to add to what Julia said, I think one interesting experiment that we went through, unfortunately, was COVID pushed us a lot more online than we ever had been before. And I think a lot of people have appreciated in-person relationships much more in terms of the flexibility they give, the ability for people to interact and to talk to each other and to support each other in ways that can't really be done online or at distances.
And as technology changes, it becomes important to still maintain this other kind of networking that's so important for students, for faculty, for everybody involved in education. And moreover for people in businesses and so forth, you can't operate 100% online. You somehow need these personal connections, and those are so vital. They're vital for doing the work, for learning, for team building, and then also throughout people's lives.
And to have that — we need to figure out ways that we can take advantage and leverage the technology, but at the same time not lose that human factor, which is so vital to our well-being. And it's a challenge. And so as Julia is pointing out, people are experimenting, and some companies are more aware of it than others. And there's different organizations now that are taking different tacks. But it's so vital to keep that human element there.
MALLIKA VINEKAR: Yeah. Absolutely. And that's a great note to end on. So thank you to Matt and Julia for such an incredibly rich and important discussion.
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