Mentoring

We study a mentoring program that aims to improve the labor-market prospects of school-attending adolescents from disadvantaged families by offering them a university-student mentor. Our RCT investigates program effectiveness on three outcome dimensions that are highly predictive of later labor-market success: math grades, patience/social skills, and labor-market orientation. For low-SES adolescents, the mentoring increases a combined index of the outcomes by over half a standard deviation after one year, with significant increases in each dimension. Part of the treatment effect is mediated by establishing mentors as attachment figures who provide guidance for the future. Effects on grades and labor-market orientation, but not on patience/social skills, persist three years after program start. By that time, the mentoring also improves early realizations of school-to-work transitions for low-SES adolescents. The mentoring is not effective for higher-SES adolescents. The results show that substituting lacking family support by other adults can help disadvantaged children at adolescent age. 

Here you can find a short non-technical overview on this topic. 

Research paper: 

Can Mentoring Alleviate Family Disadvantage in Adolescence? A Field Experiment to Improve Labor-Market Prospects (with S. Resnjanskij, J. Ruhose, S. Wiederhold, and K. Wedel). Journal of Political Economy 132 (3): 1013–1062, 2024 [tweet1] [video] [tweet2] [tweet3]

Non-technical contribution:

Mentoring Improves the School-to-Work Transition of Disadvantaged Adolescents (with S. Resnjanskij, J. Ruhose, K. Wedel, and S. Wiederhold). VoxEU.org, 17.12.2023

Mentoring Improves the Labor-Market Prospects of Disadvantaged Adolescents (with S. Resnjanskij, J. Ruhose, and S. Wiederhold). CESifo Forum 22 (4): 38-43, 2021

Material available only in German

Newspaper articles:

Raus aus der Armutsfalle. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4.2.2021, p. 6 

Wir brauchen Mentoring-Programme. fluter.de, 20.7.2021

Interview:

Auch bei älteren Jugendlichen kann man noch sehr viel erreichen (with E. Hahnke and S. Schabernak). impaktmagazin, 2021, pp. 20-25

Podcast:

Raus aus der Armutsfalle: Mentoring wirkt! Ein Podcast-Interview mit Prof. Ludger Wößmann. Rock Your Life! Podcast #059, 11.2.2021

Non-technical contributions:

Mentoring erhöht die Ausbildungsbeteiligung benachteiligter Jugendlicher (with S. Resnjanskij, J. Ruhose, K. Wedel, and S. Wiederhold). ifo Schnelldienst 76 (12): 7-10, 2023 [tweet]

Mentoring verbessert die Arbeitsmarktchancen von stark benachteiligten Jugendlichen (with S. Resnjanskij, J. Ruhose, and S. Wiederhold). ifo Schnelldienst 74 (2): 31-38, 2021