Blog #6

 

Of the italicized terms in the introduction to Education and Social Change, I wish to focus on human capital and social capital. Human capital is interesting in that it includes the personal skill and creativity a person has. Human capital is often used in terms of evaluating people’s economic value, but for the purpose of this blog I wish to look at it from the perspective of academic value rather than monetary value. In particular, human capital as I have observed it has helped to create innovation within my mentorship organization, Women & Youth Supporting Each Other (WYSE). WYSE is a student-led organization that relies on its mentors, a group of collegiate women, to create an enrichment-based after school program for middle school girls. Since it’s a program so heavily driven by its staff, human capital plays a significant role in our successes. The widely varying sets of skills, knowledge, and creativity from our different mentors help us create engaging and informative curricula for our middle school mentees, and the collaborative nature of our program leads to a constant desire to up the ante and seek improvement in ourselves. Over the two years that I’ve been involved with WYSE, I’ve seen the value of human capital and the ways individual knowledge and skills can come together to create wonderful advancement.

Social capital is similar to human capital in that they both relate directly to the value of human interaction. However, social capital focuses more on the interactions between people and the benefits that can come from creating a network of social connections. Social capital is often discussed in the context of acquiring a job, and that’s also my experience with it. I was fortunate enough to make connections with professors and English staff at my previous college, and because I had college faculty and staff familiar with and confident in my English writing capabilities, I was able to get a job as a writing tutor. That was pretty neat.