Cohorts,‘‘Siblings,’’ and Mentors

Abstract

How can an organization help participants increase their social capital? Using data from an ethnographic study of Launch, an organization that prepares low-income students of color to attend elite boarding schools, I analyze how the organization’s structures not only generate social ties among students but also stratify those ties horizontally and vertically, thereby connecting students to a set of social contacts who occupy a range of hierarchical positions and who are able to provide access to resources that are beneficial in different contexts and at different times. I argue that organizational structures can function as tools for building—and embedding participants within—social networks with advantageous structural characteristics.

Keywords

organizational structure social capital social networks pipeline programs education

Social networks provide access to information, support, and resources that help individuals stay in school, achieve academically, find a job, make difficult decisions at work, and deal with everyday matters and catastrophic emergencies (Coleman 1988; Granovetter 1973; Mizruchi and Stearns 2001; Small 2009; Wellman and Wortley 1990). For this reason, researchers have conceptualized resource-rich social ties as forms of social capital, “the ability of actors to secure benefits by virtue of membership in social networks or other social structures” (Portes 1998:6). An individual’s store of social capital depends, in part, on the organizations in which she or he participates (Small 2009), and the structure and composition of an individual’s social network may be more or less advantageous (Burt 1992, 2000; Granovetter 1973; Kay and Wallace 2009; Mizruchi and Stearns 2001). Therefore, understanding how organizations create and structure social connections among participants is important for understanding the mechanisms that undergird existing inequalities. This is particularly important for understanding how organizations devoted to participants’ social mobility may increase participants’ stores of social capital by purposefully creating and structuring social ties.

In this paper, I answer the following question: How can an organization help participants increase their social capital? I use Launch, an organization that prepares low-income students of color to attend elite boarding high schools, as a case study.¹ Based on an ethnographic study of Launch, I find that the organization not only creates social ties among participants, but it uses organizational structures to stratify those ties horizontally and vertically. Consequently, the organization equips participants with a diverse set of social contacts who occupy a range of positions within the hierarchical structures of Launch, boarding schools, and colleges; these contacts provide access to a mix of resources that are beneficial in different contexts and at different times. I argue that organizational structures can function as tools for building—and embedding participants within—social networks with advantageous structural properties that provide valuable stores of social capital.

My findings contribute to the sociological literature in two ways. First, I support and extend Small’s (2009) argument that organizations broker social ties among participants. Whereas Small found that interactions resulting from routine participation in organizations may lead to beneficial social ties, I find that organizational structures can be used to create ties that embed participants in networks with advantageous structural properties. Thus, the structure and composition of participants’ social networks likely vary based on the ways different organizations structure social ties among participants. Second, I shed light on how mobility-focused “pipeline” programs, such as A Better Chance and the Posse Foundation, may shape the experiences of low-income students at elite educational institutions (Datnow and Cooper 1997; Jack 2014, 2015; Kramer 2008; Zweigenhaft and Domhoff 2003). Specifically, such programs may foster social networks that help students overcome social and emotional challenges they are likely to face in the elite schools they will attend (Holland 2012; Horvat and Antonio 1999; Howard 2008; Ispa-Landa 2013; Jack 2014, 2015; Kuriloff and Reichert 2003).

Social Capital and Network Structures

Despite different conceptualizations of social capital (e.g., Bourdieu 1986; Coleman 1988), in empirical literature, social capital has been operationalized most commonly as an individual’s ability to access resources embedded in social networks (Portes 1998). Through social networks, individuals obtain valuable resources, such as information, services, material goods, obligations, and a sense of solidarity (Small 2009). Therefore, social capital is an important resource for status attainment (Lin 1999). Yet, like other forms of capital, social capital is unequally distributed. Access to resource-rich social ties varies by social position. Individuals in higher-status groups— whites, men, those with higher incomes, and those with more years of schooling—tend to have larger social networks that include contacts with a more heterogeneous and advantageous set of resources, relative to individuals in lower-status groups (Campbell, Marsden, and Hurlbert 1986; Cornwell and Cornwell 2008; McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears 2006; Moore 1990). Consequently, their social capital may yield higher returns, especially if their networks provide upward reachability within hierarchical social structures and are extensive in the range of positions to which they provide access (Lin 2001).

Along with network size and composition, network structure also influences the value and accessibility of resources embedded in a network. Different network structures serve different social capital–building purposes: weak ties connecting otherwise unconnected groups provide broad and early access to information (Burt 1992, 2004) and new resources (Granovetter 1973, 1974); in contrast, strong ties and networks with densely interconnected members foster trust, shared norms, feelings of obligation, and sanctions that make it less risky for network members to trust one another and so more likely that they will share resources with each other (Coleman 1988; Lin 2001). Therefore, it is advantageous to have a network that includes both weak ties connecting otherwise disconnected others and strong ties among densely interconnected contacts. Furthermore, having both strong and weak ties will likely enhance the size, or extensity, of an individual’s network, making it more likely that the network includes contacts occupying different hierarchical positions within a social structure, which should provide access to more diverse resources (Lin 1999).

Taken together, this research suggests that an individual’s social capital is influenced by the resources embedded in her or his social network and by the structure of that network. Having a network that provides upward reachability in hierarchical social structures, a heterogeneous mix of resources, and access to contacts occupying an extensive range of positions within a social structure will likely afford better access to social capital (Lin 2001). Therefore, a network structured to provide members with a mass of social ties that meet these criteria will likely yield greater returns than one that provides limited reachability, homogeneous resources, and access to a limited range of positions within a given social hierarchy. Because research on social networks focuses primarily on networks that have already formed, studies necessarily approach individuals’ stores of social capital as relatively static. These studies have increased our understanding of how social ties and the structures of the networks they create advantage and disadvantage network members, but they have not explained how individuals become embedded in social networks with advantageous structures and characteristics.

Organizations as Brokers of Social Ties

Organizations are sites where social ties are created and maintained (Duneier 1992; Wacquant 2004). Therefore, as Small (2009) argued, focusing on organizations as sites of tie formation can help us understand the origins of network inequality. In his study of mothers whose children were enrolled in child care centers, Small (2009:179) argued, “The key to how organizations broker social ties is how they affect social interaction.” He found that in an attempt to meet their own organizational needs, child care centers created policies and practices that provided opportunities and inducements for mothers to interact. These interactions generated social ties through which mothers could access resources, such as emergency child care, emotional support, and information about school admissions processes (Small 2009). These ties were a by-product—rather than an intended outcome—of the centers’ efforts to meet their own needs (Small 2009).

Studies that explore organizations’ purposeful efforts to create social ties among participants have also found that particular types of interaction foster the formation of social ties. For example, in their study of an intervention designed to increase the school-based social capital of Latino/Latina parents, Shoji and colleagues (2014) found that particular practices and activities—such as one-on-one and group discussions—facilitated the types of interactions that were likely to lead to tie formation.

These studies of organizationally embedded social ties draw attention to the role organizations play in providing a venue for interactions that create and maintain ties among participants. However, they do not incorporate insights from the network-analytic literature regarding advantageous characteristics of social networks or an actor’s position within them. Nor do they explore how organizations may deliberately contribute to the structure of social ties and the resulting networks among participants.

Mentoring programs may be one way that organizations purposefully structure ties among participants, particularly those of different ranks within an organization. Research on mentoring ties often incorporates some recognition of the structure of ties, in addition to their mere presence or absence (Higgins and Kram 2001; Kay and Wallace 2009). However, these studies focus primarily on the benefits of mentorship relationships and how these benefits differ based on characteristics of the mentor, the mentee, or the mentor-mentee match (Allen et al. 2004; Kay and Wallace 2009; Noe 1988; Ragins and Cotton 1999; Wallace 2001). This work does not systematically investigate the organization’s role in structuring those ties.

Thus, the questions still remain: How do organizations structure social ties among participants? What types of organizational structures are likely to embed participants in networks with advantageous characteristics? Given the importance of social networks for status attainment (Lin 1999), these questions may be especially relevant to organizations seeking to increase participants’ upward social mobility, particularly pipeline programs that provide educational opportunities and training for low-income students and students of color.

Social Mobility via Elite Schooling

Because many urban public school districts fail to provide high-quality education for students, a growing number of organizations—such as A Better Chance, the Oliver Scholars Program, and Prep for Prep—have sought to increase the number of low-income students and students of color in elite private schools. These pipeline programs have contributed to the steady flow of students from diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds into the nation’s most elite private secondary schools (Gaztambide-Fernández 2009; Zweigenhaft and Domhoff 2003). Attendance at an elite private school often catapults socially and economically disadvantaged students into elite colleges and universities (Zweigenhaft and Domhoff 2003). Therefore, in addition to being sites for the social reproduction of the elite, these schools are also vehicles for social mobility (Khan 2011; Massey et al. 2003; Zweigenhaft and Domhoff 2003).

Social mobility does not come without social and emotional costs. Upwardly mobile students of color in elite schools often encounter cultural norms and expectations that differ from their own, feel increasingly estranged from their families and friends back home, and feel marginalized or excluded by their more privileged peers (Granfield 1991; Howard 2008; Ispa-Landa 2013; Jack 2014; Kuriloff and Reichert 2003). The social ties that students of color attending elite schools form with students similarly situated in terms of race and class status may be particularly valuable (DeCuir-Gunby 2007; Kramer 2008; Kuriloff and Reichert 2003). These ties may contribute to students’ academic success, affirm their racial identity, provide emotional support, and help them overcome challenges they experience in predominantly white schools (Datnow and Cooper 1997).

Although these studies point to the importance of social ties for upwardly mobile students of color in elite schools, they do not explore how these ties form, how the structures of students’ networks may be beneficial, or how pre–high school (and precollege) pipeline programs influence students’ experiences. Research on the experiences of lower-income black undergraduates attending an elite college suggests that participation in a pipeline program results in differences in how students experience the same school environment (Jack 2014, 2015). Jack (2014, 2015) found that the “privileged poor”—black students who had participated in pipeline programs that funneled them into private high schools—had more positive college experiences than did the “doubly disadvantaged,” similarly economically disadvantaged black students who had not attended private high schools. Although Jack (2014, 2015) attributes these differences in college experiences to differences between the high school environments of the two types of students, it is possible that the valuable stocks of capital that the privileged poor students possess are instead rooted in the preparation and support they received in pipeline programs before they even entered high school. I investigate one such pipeline program as a case study for understanding how organizations can purposefully help participants increase their social capital.

Research Site and Methodology

Launch is an organization that prepares students to attend elite boarding high schools. It recruits high-achieving black and Latino/Latina seventh graders who are from low- or moderate-income families and are attending public, charter, or parochial schools in a large northeastern city. Prospective students are referred to the program by teachers, school counselors, or community organizations. Students undergo a selective admissions process that includes an application, IQ test, two additional standardized tests, a writing sample administered by the organization, and two or three rounds of interviews. The organization admits fewer than 10 percent of applicants.

Once admitted to Launch, students begin the organization’s 14-month preparatory program, which includes two summers of academic classes and mentoring and an intervening school year of mandatory Saturday classes and weekday tutorials. The 60 to 65 percent of students who successfully complete the preparatory program are placed in groups of two to seven students in a dozen or so boarding high schools. As Launch students progress through high school, the organization offers continued support, including college counseling, summer internships and travel opportunities, a leadership development curriculum, social gatherings, and alumni events. Boarding school graduation rates among Launch students are consistently at or above 95 percent. Of the nearly 3,000 Launch students who have graduated from college since the organization was founded, over 90 percent have attended the country’s most competitive colleges, with more than one third attending the Ivy League.² Over 40 percent of Launch college graduates are pursuing or have completed an advanced degree.³

Launch’s Summer Session

The eight-week summer session runs Monday through Friday, from 9 a.m. until 5:30 p.m., and consists of academic classes, a daily mentoring meeting, and a recreation period. For six weeks, the summer session takes place at an elite, private day school in the city in which Launch students live. For two weeks in the middle of the summer session, the program takes place on a boarding school campus. Many within the Launch community consider the summer sessions, and the two-week residential period in particular, to be the “heart and ethos” of the program.

The summer session includes both rising eighth graders (first-summer students), who will return in the fall to complete a final year at their current schools, and rising ninth graders (second-summer students), who will enter a boarding school in the fall (see Table 1). The summer session also includes teachers, administrators, and alumni-mentors (hereafter, “mentors”). The mentors are former Launch students who have completed the 14-month program and are either current boarding school students or recent boarding school graduates who are now in college. The mentors are employed by Launch for the summer and serve as teachers’ aides and as advisors and role models for the current Launch students. Each mentor is assigned a group of mentees (usually five to seven students) to meet with daily and oversee throughout the summer session.

Table 1.

Launch Participants.

Launch participants	Characteristics	Race/ethnicity
Students (115)	~14 to 15 years old Rising eighth graders (first summer; n = 70) Rising ninth graders (second summer; n = 45)	Black or Latino/Latina African Americans and children of immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa, and Central America
Mentors (11)	~18 to 22 years old Alumni/alumnae of Launch Currently in college	Black or Latino/Latina African Americans and children of immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa, and Central America
Administrators (6)	Former boarding school teachers or Launch alumni/alumnae	Black or Latino/Latina (except one white)
Teachers (9)	Teachers in private boarding or day schools	White or Latino/Latina

Note: Adapted from Cox (2016b).

Data Collection and Analysis

This paper draws from an ethnographic study of Launch’s summer session. I gained access to the organization through an acquaintance who had completed the Launch program nearly two decades earlier and who put me in touch with the program’s director. After communicating with the director and other Launch administrators, I was granted access to the program as a part-time teacher and researcher. As a white woman who has taught in private day schools and a boarding school attended by Launch students, I blended in with the other Launch teachers (see Table 1). My workload was adjusted to be about two thirds that of the other teachers to give me time to complete observations and interviews. I taught two sections of a history class, each of which included approximately 14 first-summer students. I met with each section twice a day, in two 45-minute blocks.

I collected data primarily via participant observation and interviews with each of the mentors, teachers, and administrators. At the director’s request, I did not conduct formal interviews with current Launch students.⁴ In addition to my role as a teacher, I was a participant-observer in a variety of formal and informal settings (see Table 2). During the two weeks of the summer session that took place on a boarding school campus, I lived with Launch students in a dorm.

Table 2.

Data Sources.

Data source	Details and activities
Participant observation (~500 hours)	Daily, eight weeks (including two weeks living on a boarding school campus) For six weeks: ~8:30 a.m. to ~5:30 p.m. each weekday, plus occasional evening events For two weeks: ~7 a.m. to ~10 p.m. each day (including weekends) Included all facets of the program: teacher preparation week; new student orientation; meetings (teachers, mentors, parent-teacher); academic classes; lunch; recreation period; after-school detention; study hall; interactions in the hallways and dorms; evening socializing with teachers, mentors, and administrators
Interviews (28; average length: 90 minutes)	Group interview with all mentors (1) Individual interviews: Mentors (11) Administrators (6) Teachers (9) Boarding school librarian (1)
Organizational documents (various)	Promotional materials, internal documents, written communication with families, program rules, mentors’ written evaluations of students’ progress

Note: Adapted from Cox (2016b).

Throughout the summer, I spent over 500 hours in contact with Launch students and faculty. I wrote field notes daily, often several times a day, to capture events and interactions shortly after they occurred. I conducted 28 semistructured interviews, each of which was audio-recorded and transcribed (see Table 2). During data collection, I wrote analytic memos and adjusted my interview questions to incorporate emerging insights and lines of inquiry into subsequent interviews and observations. I coded my interview transcripts and field notes in Atlas.ti using both predefined codes based on theoretical concepts and grounded “open codes” developed through line-by-line coding (Corbin and Strauss 1990). Using multiple sources of evidence, I triangulated my data to cross-check patterns and emerging ideas and to search for disconfirming evidence (Yin 2009). For example, I searched for instances when students or mentors resisted the social ties created by Launch’s organizational structures or when these ties resulted in negative rather than positive consequences for students.⁵ In particular, I looked for ways in which informal talk and interactions captured in my field notes differed from statements made in formal interviews.

Organizational Structures: Creating Horizontal and Vertical Ties

Three organizational structures at Launch—the cohort system, the two-cohort structure of the summer session, and the mentor system—create a set of stratified ties for students. Table 3 illustrates the horizontal and vertical ties created by these organizational structures. These ties bind together densely connected cohort members, each of whom is also connected to a year-older “big brother/sister” and a group of Launch alumni who serve as their mentors. Each of those contacts is in turn connected to his or her own Launch network (not depicted in Table 3). As I will show, these networks provide access to a heterogeneous mix of resources, upward reachability within the organizational hierarchies at Launch and boarding school, and connections to an extensive range of organizationally positioned others (e.g., boarding school students in different grades and at different schools and Launch alumni in different colleges and professions).

Table 3.

Organizational Structures, Resources Accessible to Launch Students, and Advantageous Network Characteristics.

Organizational structure	Specific resources accessible to Launch students	General advantageous network characteristics
Cohort structure	Academic and emotional support at Launch and boarding school Help with academic assignments Encouragement to meet academic deadlines Facilitation of help-seeking from teachers	Horizontal ties within hierarchical structure Access to a pool of redundant resources (Lin 2001) Strong ties High levels of motivation to be of mutual assistance (Granovetter 1983) Dense interconnections High levels of trust, shared norms, and feelings of obligation (Coleman 1988)
Two-cohort structure (+ cohort structure)	Academic support at Launch and boarding school Help with academic assignments Encouragement to seek help from teachers Academic advice Social and extracurricular support at boarding school Social support in transition to boarding school Introduction to culture of boarding school Advice and information about securing leadership positions	Characteristics listed above, in addition to the following: Midrange vertical ties within hierarchical structure Access to nonredundant resources possessed by those occupying higher positions within hierarchical structure (Lin 2001) Weak ties and sparse interconnections Access to resources beyond those available in own social circle (Burt 1992; Granovetter 1983)
Mentor structure (+ cohort structure + two-cohort structure)	Emotional preparedness for boarding school Advice regarding being intellectually ‘‘open’’ at boarding school Practice and advice related to asking for help and dealing with racism and racial ignorance	Characteristics listed above, in addition to the following: Long-range vertical ties within hierarchical structure Access to nonredundant resources possessed by those occupying a more extensive range of higher positions within hierarchical structure (Lin 2001)

Note: The social networks depicted here are not based on formal network data collected from each Launch student. They are conceptual representations of the networks generated by the three types of organizational structures at Launch.

Horizontal Ties: The Cohort Structure

The cohort structure fosters the formation of social ties between same-grade students. Upon entering Launch, each student becomes part of a crew, a cohort composed of approximately 70 incoming students who will progress through the 14-month program together. The organization ensures frequent contact among cohort mates by organizing most activities by cohort—ranging from mentee groups and academic classes to dorm room assignments, extra help sessions, parent meetings, and eventually, crew reunions and alumni social events.

Administrators and mentors felt that strong social ties among crew members were essential to ensure that students completed the program and were successful in boarding school. The Launch director described the purpose of the cohort structure as “building unity in groups.” “We want students to be their first line of defense for each other,” he explained. He continued,

The idea is you go off to a [boarding] school, and you’ve got three other [Launch] kids there, and they may not have been your friends, but you know they’re from Launch, they’ve had the same experience. And if you’re facing some kind of social or emotional issue, or it may be an academic one, the first person you’re going to turn to is the other Launch student.

To build these ties between cohort members, mentors and administrators spent a great deal of time and effort attempting to create a sense of cohesion and support among the members of each cohort. Mentors repeatedly encouraged students to see fellow crew members as their “family.” When talking to her mentees about their midterm summer-session grades, Caitlin, a mentor, urged them, “There’s no reason not to help each other. You’re a family. You help each other.” Calvin, another mentor, encouraged mutual support among his all-male group of mentees: “I try to stress that . . . our mentee group’s a brotherhood. I think I say that word like three times every mentee meeting.”

The practice of mentors and other Launch alumni giving their name followed by their crew number when they introduced themselves further emphasized the importance of cohort membership. For example, Zuleika, a mentor, was “Zuleika Rodriguez, crew 3” when introducing herself to students, parents, or meeting participants. The message to Launch students was clear and consistent: your fellow crew members are your “brothers” and “sisters” within the larger Launch “family,” and solidarity and support should be the hallmarks of relationships between crew members.

Vertical Ties: The Two-cohort Structure

Two organizational structures create vertical ties among Launch participants. The first of these is the two-cohort structure of the summer session. By assigning a “little brother” or “little sister” to each member of the older cohort, Launch mentors and administrators use the two-cohort structure to create ties between first- and second-summer students, who are themselves connected in a vertical chain to older Launch students who were their “big brothers/sisters” and are now attending boarding schools. The director spoke of the big brother/sister relationships as a means to provide “strong leadership” for the younger students and to develop the older students’ leadership skills, sense of responsibility, and understanding that the program is “bigger than just them.” These ties are meant to foster the general expectation that older students will serve as role models and will support students in younger cohorts.

Throughout the summer session, Launch mentors and administrators invoked the older students’ big brother/sister role to encourage older-sibling-like mentorship toward the younger students. For example, at the single-sex group meetings that mentors held with students before the program relocated to spend two weeks living on a boarding school campus, Caitlin, a mentor, asked the girls in the older cohort what advice or tips they had for their little sisters. The younger girls listened attentively as their older counterparts offered advice based on their experiences from the previous summer. Moments such as this one not only reminded the older students of the expectation to serve as a resource for younger students, but they also alerted younger students to the advice and information that may be gained by reaching “up” within the organizational hierarchy.

The role model responsibility of the older cohort was emphasized again a week later when the mentors and administrators called an “emergency” meeting with the second-summer students. The Launch director and several mentors each spoke of being “ashamed” and “disappointed” by some students’ use of homophobic and ethnic slurs to refer to their cohort mates. Then Kyle, the oldest of the mentors, spoke firmly as he urged the students to consider the influence that their behavior might have on the younger cohort:

Keep in mind that whatever you guys do, the next cohort sees, right. And they’ll try to repeat that . . . and then the next cohort does it as well. So it’s a domino effect, right. What you do now impacts many crews later on, believe it or not. . . . What example are you setting, right? Ask yourselves that. And take it seriously.

Repeated reminders, such as Kyle’s, were meant to foster the older cohort’s collective sense of responsibility and support for their younger cohort of little brothers and little sisters. These reminders also highlighted students’ indirect link to and potential impact on generations of Launch cohorts that will come after them.

Vertical Ties: The Mentor Structure

The mentor structure creates vertical ties that link current Launch students to Launch alumni. According to the director, the mentor structure is meant to provide current students with role models who can forecast what lies ahead for them: “Role models, that’s what we’re looking for in mentors . . . [to] really teach the kids what they can expect.” The mentors are from racial-ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds similar to those of current Launch students, they have completed Launch, and they are graduates (or soon-to-be graduates) of the boarding schools that the current students will attend. Therefore, in their daily meetings with their mentees, mentors are able to provide students with firsthand information and advice that the students would not otherwise have about Launch and boarding school.

Mentor-mentee interactions were marked by warmth and care, but mentors also often prodded and chided students. One night as I sat grading papers in a dorm common room, I watched Kyle prod Beau, a student in the history class for which Kyle was a teaching assistant, to complete an assignment. As Beau walked past Kyle on his way out of the room, Kyle said warmly but firmly, “Mr. Sanders, come here. Sit down, my man.” As Beau sat down, Kyle asked, “Yo, man, where’s my history homework? I haven’t read any of your great writing, man. Why?” Beau replied quietly, “I’m not doing my homework.” Kyle asked, “Why? Are you having a hard time with history?” Beau was silent and looked down at his lap. Kyle ducked his head to catch Beau’s eye as he said, “If you’re not doing your homework, we’ll have to have more of these conversations. I want conversations about celebrating your good work.” Kyle paused and then nodded toward the door, “Go on, man.” As Beau walked slowly toward the door, Kyle called after him in a no-nonsense tone, “I want my homework, man. Tomorrow. I want my homework.” Then, as if suddenly remembering the history midterm exam the following day, Kyle asked, “Have you studied for history?” Looking defeated, Beau shook his head as he mumbled, “No.” Kyle blurted out, “Not yet? What time it is?” “Ten-fifteen,” Beau answered. Kyle said in a tone of resignation, “I guess we’ll be having this conversation tomorrow.” As Beau walked toward the door, Kyle called after him, “I want my homework, man.” Beau nodded and left the room as Kyle shook his head in what appeared to be a mixture of disapproval and disappointment.

When mentors perceived a student as not meeting the program’s expectations, mentor-mentee ties became strained and stifling for the student, as mentors ramped up their surveillance and sometimes resorted to reprimands that bordered on public shaming (see Cox 2016a). In these moments, social ties led to excessive social control, a negative consequence of social capital that other researchers have documented (Portes 1998).

The case of Beau, a first-summer student who was eventually asked to leave the program after repeatedly refusing to complete a long-overdue homework assignment, makes it clear that the organization’s social ties are not always enough to keep students in the program and on track to boarding school. The majority of students who leave the program do so voluntarily within the first few weeks of their first summer session, arguably before Launch-based social ties have solidified. However, each year a few students leave the program during their second summer, just a few weeks before they would otherwise be heading off to boarding school.

Taken together, Launch’s three organizational structures embed students in a network of ties to other students who are experiencing or have experienced the same transition out of underfunded, racially segregated schools and into elite boarding schools. Variation in frequency of contact, intensity, and reciprocity of ties within each structure will likely lead to strong ties within densely interconnected cohorts and weaker ties that bridge between cohorts (Granovetter 1973).⁶ These ties provide students with opportunities to reach “up” to older Launch students and Launch alumni in boarding school and college, and they provide students with contacts occupying a range of positions within the social structures at Launch, boarding school, and college. This upward reachability and extensity of ties likely provide better social capital than would a more “flat” social network with a more limited range of ties (Lin 2001). As I will show, this combination of ties and the advantageous characteristics of the network they create provides students with access to a valuable mix of resources.

A Network of Stratified Ties Provides Valuable Resources

The social ties that the organizational structures of Launch create serve as social capital that students are able to “cash in” for academic, social, and emotional resources immediately at Launch and later at boarding school.

Academic Support

Social ties among Launch students provide access to a range of academic resources that help students persist in the program and progress through boarding school. During the preparatory program, ties among cohort mates provide encouragement for academic success and direct help with academic work. Mentors often credited their persistence in completing Launch to the help and support they received from their fellow crew members. Kyle recounted how he and his crew mates had “stayed on top of” one another to overcome academic struggles:

So if someone’s failing a class, you want the rest of the cohort to stay on top of them. If they’re outside and they have free time, they’re not doing work, you’ll see two or three cohort mates come out there like, “What are you doing? Go to your room.” That’s what used to happen in my cohort.

As Zuleika recalled of her crew mates, cohort ties also helped students manage Launch’s heavy academic workload:

We always helped each other, which was important. That’s when I started learning “Launch Forever” and that Launch was a family. . . . The whole cohort knew: this group of kids is good at science, this group of kids are good at math, [or] English. So that’s how we did it: Saturday morning, we’d come in the morning [and say to each other], “I don’t really get this, can you help me?”

Zuleika and her crew mates were in regular contact as they helped each other academically: “Calling each other, all that—every single number on my phone. We were like a factory, like, ‘Let’s produce perfect grades.’ And that’s how we did it.”

During the summer session I observed, norms of academic support among cohort members developed quickly. After the first week of the program, each morning before classes started, students huddled together in small groups throughout the cafeteria. Leaning over spiral notebooks and three-ring binders bursting with papers, students worked through geometry proofs together or pointed out illustrative passages in Great Expectations as they helped each other try to master academic material often reserved for high school students. During the two weeks they lived on the boarding school campus, these intracohort study sessions became more frequent.

Vertical ties between first- and second-summer students also provided academic resources for students. In the single-sex group meeting described earlier, girls in the older cohort encouraged the younger girls to seek help from other Launch students once living on the boarding school campus: “ask for help if you need it,” “find out who’s good at what in your dorm,” and “take advantage” of the fact that they will be living among second-summer students who have “done what you’re doing and can help you,” the older girls advised. Many younger students took this advice, and they approached older students for homework help during evening study hours or sought assistance from older students when trying to locate a book in the boarding school’s 60,000-volume library. Thus, these vertical ties provided not only direct help with academic assignments but also information and advice that only older students could provide.

Social ties among Launch students also provided indirect academic support by pushing students to ask teachers for help, an action that was often crucial for academic success in the program. Research suggests that seeking help from teachers is likely to foster positive student-teacher relationships that transmit a host of valuable resources and support in addition to academic help (Stanton-Salazar 2011). However, lower-income students are less likely than their middle-class peers to seek help from teachers, and as a result they are often academically disadvantaged (Calarco 2011, 2014; Croninger and Lee 2001).

Launch mentors, teachers, and administrators repeatedly encouraged students to ask teachers for help. However, Launch students, who had rarely, if ever, needed to seek academic help from a teacher, resisted asking for help. The mentors had experienced both initial resistance to and the eventual benefits from seeking help from teachers at Launch and at boarding school, and as Kyle explained, mentors sought to pass these lessons on to current Launch students:

We’re just trying to teach them that it’s okay to ask for help. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges when our kids go to boarding school because when they’re in public school, they’re so smart, they do so well, they’re like straight-A students, and then they get to the boarding schools and they’re not doing so well. So what makes or breaks some of these students is asking for help.

Mentors often used their authority to require students to practice this behavior. “I’ll make them actually go ask their teachers for help,” Kyle explained. As a teacher I frequently saw this “requirement” in action. At the end of one history class, for example, three girls were quick to tell me that their mentor Sofia had told them to ask me for after-school help with their research papers. In the resulting help session, the three students, along with three other cohort mates whom they brought along, brainstormed thesis statements for each other’s papers and pushed one another to form better arguments. Before the end of the session, the students scheduled another group help session with me later that week. These students’ research papers improved dramatically due to the help they received from me and each other during these sessions. In incidents such as these, the combination of vertical and horizontal ties benefited students: vertical mentor-mentee ties provided the push to seek help from teachers, and horizontal cohort ties pulled in fellow crew mates who attended extra help sessions that their peers had arranged with a teacher.

Ties between first- and second-summer students often provided the extra nudge that many first-year students needed. One morning during our stay on the boarding school campus, as I was leaving the dining hall, Lio, a second-summer student, gave his “little brother” Eddie just such a nudge. Lio had been walking with Eddie and several of Eddie’s friends. When Lio saw me, he stepped away from Eddie and the other boys to ask me within earshot of Eddie and his friends, “Ms. Cox, does Eddie ask for help in your class?” Knowing what Lio might be up to with this line of questioning, since Eddie was dangerously close to failing my history class, I looked at Eddie as I replied with a grin, “No, never.” Lio nodded at me and then walked purposefully back to Eddie and the other first-summer students walking beside him. Patting Eddie on the back, Lio said, “Eddie, man, Ms. Cox says you don’t ask for help. What’s up?” Eddie smiled sheepishly and was silent. Lio took a step in front of Eddie and walked backward while facing him and the other boys. Eddie remained silent, and Lio prodded, “Man, you gotta ask for help.” The boys walked on, and Lio continued to walk backward facing Eddie as he talked about the importance of asking teachers for help.

The following week, for the first time that summer, Eddie initiated contact with me and asked for my help with his research paper. After a couple of after-school help sessions, Eddie eventually earned a passing grade on his research paper and in my history class. In addition to the repeated entreaties from mentors and teachers, the urging of Eddie’s “big brother” may have been what finally convinced him to approach me for help. In this way, organizationally created relationships helped students benefit from the lessons older students had learned, thereby giving younger students access to information, services, and support that helped them progress in the program.

Because Launch sends groups of two to seven students to roughly a dozen boarding schools each year, the horizontal cohort ties and the vertical cross-cohort ties created during the Launch program continue to serve as sources of academic support once students enter boarding school. Typical in mentors’ recollections was the type of support Tanisha had received from older Launch students at her boarding school:

They would always come by the dorm, or if they saw you walking by from class to class, they’d stop you and ask how are you doing, but really on a genuine level. . . . They would actually take the time to find out how you are doing in each of your classes and kind of just ask you if you need any advice, or actually help you schedule your classes, because they’d taken most of the classes or had a lot of the teachers, so they’d help you in that way.

This support system provided students with information and advice about classes and teachers that only an older student—a vertical tie—could provide. Thus, the hierarchically stratified set of ties that Launch’s organizational structures create gives students access to a range of academic resources, some of which might best be provided by horizontal ties and some of which might be accessible only through vertical ties to older students.

Social Support

Organizationally created ties also provide social support to students, especially as they transition into boarding school. Ties to older Launch students had eased the mentors’ transitions into boarding school. Caitlin recounted a Launch pizza party that a student in the cohort one year ahead of her had organized on Caitlin’s first night at boarding school. She explained, “So I got to meet everybody that was there that was in Launch already, so it was really cool. I remember everybody being really, really friendly and I made a group of friends already on the first day.” Marcus recounted a similarly smooth transition facilitated by the older Launch students who helped him and several of his crew mates settle in at their new school. In particular, older Launch students at Marcus’s boarding school introduced him to the culture of the school. Marcus explained, “They would kind of teach us the vernacular almost of boarding school life—so what ‘feeds’ were. . . . They taught us about sit-down dinners, to make sure to be on time to that. They taught us what grades were.” Thus, vertical ties between Launch students helped younger students transition to their new boarding school environments by providing them with practical help, friendship, and a feeling of belonging that low-income students and students of color do not always find in elite schools (Holland 2012; Horvat and Antonio 1999; Ispa-Landa 2013; Jack 2014).

Social support from older Launch students continued beyond the first few weeks of the school year. As Tanisha explained, the Launch students in the senior class at her boarding school were especially important:

The seniors usually take on that role to make sure that all of the Launch kids on campus continue to keep that Launch family while they’re there. They would schedule dinners and kind of just take us all out and make sure we all gather together sometimes during the semester just to make sure that we know we’re still Launch even though we’re not in [our home city].

Several mentors reported that older Launch students at their boarding schools had regularly “checked up on” or “took care of” them. Calvin received check-ins from five older Launch students who came to his dorm room each evening: “They’d come in, like, ‘Calvin, how are you doing? You messing up?’ It was good. They took care of me.” These relationships provided students with contacts in each grade at their boarding school, which helped them locate and mobilize a range of resources when needed.

Cross-cohort relationships also helped students get involved with extracurricular activities on campus. For example, Marcus credited his participation in many extracurriculars—playing ultimate Frisbee, attending dances, and joining the football, basketball, and track teams—to urgings from older Launch students. Cross-cohort ties also helped many mentors secure leadership positions in school activities. Kyle, for example, was elected to a high-level position in his boarding school’s student government as a result of advice he received from the Launch student who had held the position before him. Kyle later advised younger Launch students on how to secure the same position. Kyle explained,

When the people below me asked me, “How do I get this position?” I was ready. I was ready to explain what they had to do, what steps they had to take to impress everybody and to get their name up there.

Kyle proudly reported that the position had been held for four consecutive years by four different Launch students.

Vertical ties among Launch students also provided students with valuable emotional support that helped them navigate the social world of boarding school. On the basis of their experiences living and learning among boarding school classmates from all over the world, mentors felt that one of the crucial lessons they were trying to teach their own mentees was to be intellectually “open.” Sofia, a mentor, explained this concept as “be[ing] able to deal with diversity, and not just in terms of race or ethnicity, but diversity of thought.” Mentors recounted lessons their own Launch mentors had taught them about being open to people and ideas that they might initially find threatening. Calvin credited his openness to religious debates in boarding school classes to conversations led by his mentor within his mentee group at Launch. Kyle attributed his ability to overcome his discomfort upon learning that his boarding school roommate, who was also a close friend, was gay to the advice he had received from his Launch mentor.

Ties to mentors also provided students with encouragement to form friendships with boarding school peers of different races, ethnicities, and geographic origins. Nicolas described how he encourages his mentees to “have an open mind” and to “branch out” because, in his opinion, “boarding school is not just the academics. It’s the people you meet and the experiences.” Like many of the other mentors, Nicolas encouraged his mentees to make friends with students who seem different from them, especially white classmates, whom Nicolas believed many Launch students are “scared” of or believe “myths” about.

Given research that documents positive outcomes for students with cross-race friendships, Launch mentors’ beliefs in their importance are not unfounded. Mentors’ encouragements to their mentees to become friends with students of other races may lead to friendship patterns that are less racially and socioeconomically segregated than students would otherwise form (Moody 2001; Mouw and Entwisle 2006; Quillian and Campbell 2003). The resulting positive cross-race interactions are likely to increase students’ appreciation of racial and cultural diversity and their openness to being challenged by different ideas, values, and perspectives (Pascarella et al. 1996). Such cross-race interactions may also lead to positive social, cognitive, and civic outcomes for students (Gurin et al. 2002; Hurtado 2005).

Finally, vertical mentor-mentee ties provided students with access to firsthand information and preparation for dealing with outright racism and racial ignorance that they might encounter at boarding school. Nicolas, who is Latino and attends an Ivy League university, reported encountering racist remarks from some of his boarding school peers and their parents, including the mother of his white girlfriend. When I asked Nicolas if he had expected to hear such comments at boarding school, he replied, “Yes, my mentors talked about that and how to properly react.” He explained what his mentors had taught him:

Like if somebody calls you a racial word, don’t proceed to go hit them, don’t act abusively. Know that they can get kicked out for saying that. You just go to the administration and the administration will—they need to take care of it because no school wants to be associated with racism. And they [the mentors] taught us how to deal with it, and that it could happen.

Conversations with her mentor had also helped Trisha, a Launch administrator and alumna, anticipate her white boarding school classmates’ questions about her hair, which she wears in long, tight braids. She explained, “Whenever those conversations came up, they were still uncomfortable, but I expected them to come up because of the conversations we had with our mentors where they said, ‘You know what, these things are going to be said.’”

The mentors felt that simply being made aware that they might hear racist comments or be asked offensive questions had helped prepare them to deal with racism and racial ignorance that many said they had not encountered before entering boarding school. In turn, they tried to prepare their own mentees for such encounters. Through conversations and role-play activities that provided what one mentor referred to as a “pre-shock,” mentors emotionally prepared students for uncomfortable situations they may encounter at boarding school. Vertical ties thus provided younger students with information, advice, and an opportunity to learn and practice strategies for reacting to difficult situations within an environment they had not yet experienced and knew very little about.

Discussion and Conclusions

When a student begins Launch, she or he becomes enmeshed in a web of structured relationships that include current Launch students and alumni. As Table 3 illustrates, through the organization’s structures, students acquire social ties that connect them horizontally to same-grade peers and vertically to older Launch students and alumni, who are connected to still older Launch students and alumni (not depicted in Table 3). Horizontal ties embed students in a densely interconnected network of cohort members who provide access to academic support that helps students progress through Launch and into boarding school. Vertical ties connect students across cohorts and so provide access to information and advice from older Launch students and alumni who occupy a range of positions within the hierarchies of Launch, boarding school, and college. Collectively, these ties embed students in a network that provides access to a heterogeneous pool of academic, social, and emotional resources.

These findings contribute to the sociological literature in two ways. First, they support and extend Small’s (2009) argument that organizations broker social ties among participants and thereby contribute to differences in individuals’ stores of social capital. Whereas Small found that ties among mothers were largely an unintentional by-product of child care centers’ attempts to meet their own needs, I find that organizational structures can be used as a tool to create social ties and resulting social networks that are likely to be advantageous. As the case of Launch demonstrates, organizational structures can generate stratified ties, thereby providing participants access to social contacts who occupy a range of hierarchical positions and who are able to provide a mix of resources that are beneficial in different contexts and at different times. Furthermore, to the extent that organizational structures create ties that vary in frequency of interaction, duration, intensity, and reciprocity (Granovetter 1973), these structures will likely equip participants with both strong ties and weak ties, an advantageous combination for expressive and instrumental purposes (Burt 2000; Granovetter 1973). To the extent that these ties reach “up” and also provide access to others occupying a range of positions within hierarchical structures, they are likely to yield even greater returns (Lin 2001). In short, the case of Launch demonstrates that organizational structures can serve as network-structuring tools that build social networks with advantageous characteristics. Although my study is not comparative, this case suggests that differences in social capital may result not only from differences in organizational participation (as Small [2009] found) but also from variation in how organizations structure social ties among participants.

The second contribution of these findings is related to the process of social mobility via elite educational institutions and the role that pipeline programs, such as Launch, may play in influencing the social and emotional costs associated with this process. The relatively smooth transitions and positive experiences Launch mentors reported at their boarding schools parallel those of the “privileged poor” in Jack’s (2014, 2015) study of low-income students attending an elite college. My findings build on Jack’s (2014, 2015) by looking further back in the educational trajectory of students who will become, in Jack’s terms, members of the privileged poor once they enter college. Jack argues that the more positive college experiences of the privileged poor are rooted in those students’ high school experiences, but my findings indicate that at least some portion of the valuable stocks of capital these students acquire is rooted in the preparation and support they receive in pipeline programs—that is, prior to entering private high schools.

The evidence I present here suggests that students in pipeline programs may acquire access to valuable resources that are embedded in the social ties they obtain through these programs. Unlike many of their more class-privileged boarding school peers, Launch students are unlikely to have known any of their classmates through family or friends, attendance at the same private elementary schools, or membership in the same clubs or as a result of summers spent at vacation homes on the same islands prior to entering boarding school (Khan 2011). For Launch students, the boarding school–based social ties they have upon arrival at boarding school are those created through the organizational structures of Launch. Launch students then draw on these ties as they progress through these elite schools, which equip them with still greater stores of capital—particularly, cultural capital—that ease their transition into elite colleges, such as the one attended by the students in Jack’s (2014, 2015) study (Gaztambide-Fernández 2009; Khan 2011).

A few limitations of this study are worth noting. First, this study was not longitudinal. However, I obtained extensive information from Launch mentors who completed the program years earlier and went on to attend elite boarding schools. Therefore, I was able to use the mentors’ (and several alum-administrators’) experiences as students in the program, and later in boarding school, to understand parts of a process that unfolded over time. Mentors’ experiences at boarding school made it clear that they continued to access resources embedded in the social network in which the Launch program had positioned them. Thus, the mentors and alum-administrators helped me understand how the ties they obtained through Launch served as social capital as they progressed through boarding school.

A second limitation of this study is that it does not allow me to compare differences between the social capital of Launch students and that of similar students who either participated in a different pipeline program or attended boarding school but did not participate in such a program. Nor does this study allow me to use formal network analysis to analyze the social networks of Launch students and alumni. Future research could expand my findings by comparing the characteristics of networks in organizations that purposefully structure social ties with those that do not or by comparing the characteristics of networks in organizations that purposefully structure social ties in different ways—for example, through long-term mentoring relationships, a series of short-term mentoring relationships, peer-to-peer collaborations, or assignment of mentors or peers for specific professional or psychosocial purposes (Higgins and Kram 2001).

As an organization that purposefully creates stratified ties among participants, Launch is likely not unique. Such organizations may already be mitigating or exacerbating inequalities in the distribution of social capital. For example, graduate students coming out of university programs that have vertical support structures connecting incoming students with advanced graduate students likely develop valuable (and likely weak) social ties they are able to draw on while in the program and later while in the job market and in their first academic position. If a graduate program also has structures that encourage horizontal (and likely strong) ties between students in the same cohort, these students may be more advantaged, in terms of social-capital development, than those in programs without such structures. Similarly, workplaces that structure work in cross-divisional teams or that have affinity groups for women or racial minorities may lead employees to have more stratified social ties than do employees who work at organizations with no connection-building structures. Additionally, sororities and fraternities often create elaborate networks of horizontal and vertical ties within and across colleges.

Unless we pay closer attention to differences in the degree to which organizations purposefully create and structure social ties among participants, we run the risk of overestimating the importance of individual agency and personal characteristics in determining differences in individuals’ levels of social capital. As this case study of Launch suggests, turning our attention to how organizations structure social connections among participants is an important step in understanding strategies to mitigate existing inequalities in social capital.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Sarah Adeyinka-Skold, Charles Bosk, Sherelle Ferguson, Lindsay Wood Glassman, Peter Harvey, Annette Lareau, Robin Leidner, Mary Cate Opila, Rand Quinn, Kathleen Riley, Blair Sackett, Amy Steinbugler, Natalie Young, and three anonymous Sociology of Education reviewers for their thoughtful comments on drafts of this paper. The paper is stronger as a result of their careful reading and valuable feedback. My thanks also go to Prudence Carter for input on the design of my study and to Annette Lareau for countless conversations during and after my fieldwork at Launch.

Research Ethics

My research protocol was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board at Stanford University, where I was a student when conducting this study. All human subjects gave their informed consent prior to their participation in the research, and adequate steps were taken to protect participants’ confidentiality.

Notes

Author Biography

Amanda Barrett Cox is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation research focuses on how philanthropic foundations reproduce and transform forms of social, economic, and political inequality. She is also working with Amy Steinbugler (Dickinson College) and Rand Quinn (University of Pennsylvania) on a project that investigates the school- and neighborhood-based social networks of parents sending their children to a school of choice. Other articles based on her study of Launch appear in Sociological Forum and Symbolic Interaction.

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