Young people are returning to schools and colleges after pandemic lockdowns suspended the education system’s important face-to-face role in nurturing personal friendships and professional connections.
Recent studies by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues show that friendships and other relationships across socioeconomic lines experienced in places like schools and the workforce play a key role in boosting upward mobility and expanding opportunity in America.
These community-level relationships, what the researchers call social capital, produce economic connectedness, which contrasts with friending bias, or people’s tendency to stay within the social class networks they know, associating with people like themselves.
