For decades, education reform focused on getting more students from disadvantaged backgrounds into college, and then on actually getting them through. More recently though, there’s been a growing recognition that even graduating may not be enough to land an upwardly-mobile job.
A key stumbling block is poor social capital—the networks of people who can expose students to a wide range of careers and help connect them to opportunities.
Sheila Sarem’s career has followed this arc of understanding. She founded Basta, a New York-based nonprofit, eight years ago after working for Washington, D.C., public schools and the KIPP Foundation in recruitment and hiring.
In that work, she started seeing a discrepancy between what educational institutions were telling young people about college and career outcomes and what was really happening on the ground.
“I was immersed in the promise of education reform, which at the time was very simple: ‘Graduate high school, go to college, and everything’s going to work out for you,’” Sarem says. “But hiring often happens through informal networks or people making introductions or doing sidebar recommendations after somebody is interviewed. People hire from their alma maters or because someone was in their sorority or fraternity.
“All of these things are just not coming to life when we’re sharing with first-generation students how it works.”
The Big Idea: Basta aims to make that transparent. It’s one of several nonprofits, like Braven, COOP, and the Social Capital Academy, that have come online in the past decade with a specific focus on helping first-generation and underrepresented minority students build social capital.
Basta’s particular take leans heavily on data and, increasingly, AI tools. Its AI-powered Seekr tool, for example, helps students explore their interests and priorities when it comes to work and identifies where they are on their career paths. And it will allow the organization to dramatically expand its reach.
With Seekr and a new $4M gift from MacKenzie Scott—about 50% of Basta’s operating expenses for the next year—the organization is planning to grow substantially, particularly in the U.S. South with a focus on minority-serving institutions.
Leveraging Data to Help First-Gen Students
The Details: Basta pairs its AI tool with a high-touch approach. It provides fellowships to first-generation college students, initially in New York City. Students meet regularly in small groups for career coaching, receive help with crafting their resumes and practicing interviews, and most importantly make connections with potential employers in their field of interest.
Since the organization launched in 2016, it’s worked with around 8K students across more than 60 campuses in the country. By 2030, they hope to have reached 35K students, with 1 million users of Seekr. Basta is partnering with a growing number of universities to get Seekr in front of students and then deliver content to help guide them on their next steps.
‘Aha’ Moments: Basta also then uses the data it gathers to guide the work it does with students and employers. One of the first insights they uncovered—shared publicly so any employer or college can take advantage of it—is that first-generation students with a “high exposure score,” meaning they’ve been exposed to many different industries, get their first jobs after graduation faster. The exposure score had a bigger impact on securing a job than any other variable they looked at, including whether the student had an internship.
Another big insight the organization uncovered is that it matters a lot where a mentor sits in their organization. Senior professionals play a critical role in helping early career job seekers get those first jobs. Two of their employer partners—Bloomberg and Google—now have robust mentorship programs.
“Given that very important insight, we’re always connecting the young people in our various programs to senior professionals to provide the sort of knowledge and networks necessary,” Sarem says.
It’s All About Who You Know
O’Neil Edwards, who was born in Jamaica, was almost one of those first-generation college students who slip through the cracks. In 2017, he was one year away from graduating from Baruch College. From an early age, he had an interest in entrepreneurship and finance, but he struggled to get his foot in the door, despite being at a college renowned in the field.
Edwards worked several jobs in college that added up to at least 40 hours a week, from scooping ice cream to working as a bank teller to handling packages for FedEx. These jobs paid the bills, but didn’t allow for much extra time for the kinds of extracurriculars that help students grow their networks.
Edwards knew from talking with his career counselor, professors, and other students that an internship was critical to getting a job, and he attended career fairs. But he couldn’t get an internship. Next, he applied for two fellowships for underrepresented students, thinking they would help him get an internship. They, too, rejected him. His GPA was slightly too low, and he didn’t have enough extracurriculars on his resume, they told him.
“I was literally reaching out to anyone who would just hold my hand and just slightly pull me in the right direction,” he says.
Edwards was dismayed until he saw a friend post about Basta on LinkedIn and decided to try one more time. Basta accepted him. Through a Basta summit at Bloomberg headquarters and a push from his career success manager to apply for an entry-level equity specialist position at the company, Edwards landed a job at Bloomberg just a few months after graduation. He’s now been there for five years and is a senior account manager in sales.
“Basta did not shun me for the fact that I didn’t have a perfect GPA. They didn’t shun me for the fact that I didn’t have any internships,” Edwards says. “They just met me where I was at, and they worked with me.
“And working at Bloomberg has transformed my life.”
A Growing Need: The step up that Basta provided Edwards is becoming even more necessary as AI is changing the landscape of job seeking, according to Julia Freeland Fisher, director of education outreach at the Christensen Institute and author of the book “Who You Know: Unlocking Innovations that Expand Students’ Networks.”
“There was a sort of technocratic fantasy that AI would democratize the job application process,” Freeland Fisher says. “But you can’t just make it easier to apply to jobs. You actually have to make it easier to get jobs. And that still hinges on these things like experience and networks.”
Freeland Fisher hopes for a future where colleges and universities are doing the networking work necessary to help first-generation students, but until then organizations like Basta are filling in.
Expanding DEI Efforts
Guiding first-generation college students into entry-level jobs in their chosen fields not only helps them, but also their employers. Many industries are struggling to diversify their workforce in a sustainable and lasting way, and Basta’s use of data has come in handy in guiding employers, too.
Sonia Atsegbua, director of strategic partnerships at Basta, said the organization keeps track of where Basta fellows apply, how far they get in the process, and what the students’ demographics are. Rather than keep the data internal, they share it with employers at the end of every hiring cycle and stack them against what the employer’s overall goals are.
“We can say, ‘We had 20 female-identifying software engineer candidates, but only two of them advanced to the final interview round,’” Atsegbua says. “Is it because they weren’t the right profile? Was it that there were some biases that could have been present throughout the interview process?
“Sometimes those data conversations help to uncover things that can support our employer partner as they make shifts.”
On The Ground: One of those partners is Fisher Brothers, a mid-size real estate firm in New York City. The firm has hired about 35 Basta fellows as interns so far. Winston Fisher, a partner at the firm, first approached Basta when he was looking around for internship programs that focused on underrepresented students—who are particularly underrepresented in the real estate industry. Impressed with the organization’s approach, he signed on right away.
Using their data, Basta educated Fisher and his colleagues on what Basta fellows needed most—things like group projects and opportunities for them to develop communication skills in the corporate environment. Fisher Brothers used this information to create a program where fellows rotate around different departments to get a feel for which areas they like the most and learn the basic skills they’d need to get a job after graduation.
Fisher Brothers has not hired any former Basta fellows due to being a smaller company with few entry-level positions. But fellows have gone on to work at J.P. Morgan and Bloomberg.
Fisher acknowledges that diversifying his industry will be a slow process. It’s dominated by small, family-run firms—like his own—that hire infrequently and often pass down leadership roles to family members. But he believes that giving first-generation students the opportunity and connections to succeed is vital to the future of the industry.
“It’s easy to fall into the trap of prestige—the institution from which you should hire,” Fisher says. “But there’s incredible talent that exists outside that. You’ve got to give people the opportunity.”