Double Down on Mentorship – Religion & Liberty Online

With ubiquitous AI technology cutting openings for white collar jobs, the market is brimming with unanswered employment applications. Unfortunately, this shrinking market for new hires often buries both legitimate job opportunities, especially for business students, and the potential these students have to enrich certain firms. One effective solution for business students is to pursue relationships with well-positioned mentors, who will serve as their mediators, signaling opportunities to them and vouching for their trustworthiness to affiliated companies. Today business schools have a unique value proposition and calling to match students with such mentors. Therefore, business schools should double down on mentorship, and students should correspondingly pursue mentors.

An overly centralized approach to the labor market with resources such as generic career centers, massive career fairs, and vast job sites are not nearly as efficient as a single mentor’s recommendation. Like natural prices, mentors’ recommendations are loaded with multifaceted localized information: work ethic, integrity, responsibility, competency, etc. By “mentors’ recommendations,” I do not mean merely recommendation letters or phone calls, although it can at least be those. Instead, I refer to one-off opportunities, serendipitous connections, and time-constrained needs that are mediated by mentors. These are the types of knowledge that F.A. Hayek referred to in his essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, and this is the type of knowledge that business schools and students need to consider when thinking about today’s labor market.

Unfortunately for business schools, especially undergraduate ones, the education they offer is often freely accessible through the internet and artificial intelligence. Yes, business classes offer dynamic dialogue and add important nuance to traditional business acumen. But I do not think such knowledge is sufficient for students to justify the cost of paying tens or hundred of thousands of dollars for a marginally better education. Business schools must provide opportunities for mentorship because a greater network is more effective than merely a more specialized understanding of how a business works in this AI-augmented market.

Indeed one of the highest value propositions of attending business school today is access to formal and informal mentorship through excellent upperclassmen, invested faculty, and the university’s network. Business schools can and do intentionally cultivate such mentoring relationships through peer leadership programs, office hour requirements for professors, cohort programs with industry mentor pairings, school-funded business clubs, and other settings that utilize the school’s resources to build leverageable networks for the students. While classes may educate students in sound business principles, these mentorship settings are where students often receive critical insights into their chosen specialties, especially in network-based industries such as management consulting and investment banking. Even in marketing, sales, and less competitive forms of finance, a mentoring network might be the deciding variable for landing a decent summer internship or first corporate job.

Quality mentorship settings can be found in more than just the business schools themselves: Local business cohorts, fellowships, and organizations are full of potential mentors. However, learning about or accessing such a setting for the first time, toppling over that first connection domino, might require an informed and respected affiliation. Business schools, especially well-connected ones, can serve as that respected affiliation, opening doors to such external mentoring settings.

Before I left for my freshman year of college, my mom told me that college is about the connections you make there. Like most front-loaded mom-wisdom, it was largely true in my experience. In high school, I ran cross-country. Providentially, my cross-country coaches doubled as successful wealth managers, and near the end of the season, they promised me an internship after my freshman year of college. Even though I had submitted zero internship applications in my freshman year of college, I had developed long-term trust with these mentors, who paved the way for my first internship. At their firm, I met a new senior hire, who was an alumni of my college. As my new mentor, he connected me with one of his college mentors, who later decided to help me out, informing me about the Emerging Leaders Program at Acton, even sending an introductory email to Noah Gould to signal my interest. Personal agency was certainly a factor, but I would be a fool not to give credit to the chain of mentoring relationships.

I hope my story does not reek of some kind of nepotism. According to my coaches, I had truly earned their trust in me. It is important also to note that mentors ought to be virtuous and should only advocate for a mentee once they deem him or her truly equipped to do the job.

I think business schools, especially faith-based ones, have a present calling to bless their students through a thick community in this AI-augmented era. A thick community is one built on and sustained by sacrificial love. Instead of overprioritizing post-graduation ambitions, upperclassmen can coach and mentor underclassmen through the labyrinth of the job market. Instead of overprioritizing publication goals, faculty can invest in a few extra students every semester. Instead of neglecting their roots, more established professionals can thoughtfully re-engage with the college demographic. In doing so, they will resist economic hyper-efficiency and obey the command that the Apostle Paul gave to the church of Philippi: “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”

Of course, such upperclassmen, faculty, and professionals have real economic interests that they must tend to, but they must also look beyond them in order to fulfill their God-given calling to contribute to the common good and, if both parties are Christians, to the body of Christ. In doubling down on mentorship, they will recognize more talent, mediate more opportunities, and bless more people. And they, as blessers of others, will be blessed—that is, made happy for doing so.