Mentoring Helps Disadvantaged Adolescents in Germany Launch Careers
Support from university student volunteers doubles the chances that adolescents from disadvantaged families have of starting vocational training. This mentoring improves not only the school pupils’ grades in math but also their focus on the future and their labor-market orientation. These are among the findings of an ifo research project that accompanied the “Rock Your Life!” mentoring program. “This kind of support has produced resounding successes,” says Ludger Wößmann, Director of the ifo Center for the Economics of Education. “Mentoring is a great way of improving the labor-market prospects of highly disadvantaged adolescents.”
Three years after the mentoring program began, the proportion of disadvantaged adolescents without a mentor who were in vocational training was 27 percent. For participants in the program, the share was 29 percentage points higher. Math grades among disadvantaged school pupils who participated in the mentoring program were 0.8 points higher than those of pupils without a mentor. At the same time, mentored students were 31 percentage points more satisfied with their situation, while their likelihood of wanting to change their situation was 22 percentage points lower. “Mentoring programs should focus on helping adolescents from highly disadvantaged backgrounds. Only then are they effective. The program yielded no positive effects for adolescents from more comfortable backgrounds,” says ifo education expert Katharina Wedel, coauthor of the study.
The study covered 308 adolescents at 19 schools in ten German cities, of whom around half participated in the “Rock Your Life!” program for one to two years. The program is aimed at schoolchildren in eighth and ninth grade (average age 14) attending German high schools known as “Hauptschulen,” and similar school types with a vocational element, located in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Its goal is to help pupils make a successful transition from the foundational high school level to vocational training or the higher-level school grades. Since its launch by university students 15 years ago, the program has created over 10,000 mentoring pairs in more than 50 locations.
The results of the study will be published in the Journal of Political Economy, one of the top five economics journals in the world.
Berufseinstieg als Wachstumsfaktor – wie wir Kompetenzen für die Zukunft aufbauen können
ifo Institut, München, 2023
ifo Schnelldienst, 2023, 76, Nr. 12, 03-27
