Nobody Hands You the Rulebook

For more than thirty years, I have interviewed and mentored young people through my educational foundation. Most come from modest backgrounds, many of them from mainland China, and they arrive at universities such as Oxford and Cambridge with outstanding grades. What strikes me again and again is that grades are rarely what they struggle with.

What they struggle with are the rules nobody writes down. How to introduce yourself to someone senior. Whether it is acceptable to email a lecturer you have never met. How to ask for help without feeling that you have failed. When to speak up in a meeting and when to listen. How to negotiate a first salary rather than accepting whatever is offered. Some young people absorb these things at the dinner table without ever noticing. Others have to work them out alone, often after a few painful mistakes.

I should be honest that I was in the first group. I was born into the fourth generation of a business family, and I grew up around people who understood how these rules worked. I didn't earn that advantage. Watching talented scholars arrive without it has taught me how much it matters.

The research bears this out. In 2022, the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues published a study in Nature based on the social networks of 72 million Facebook users in the United States. They wanted to understand what helps children from low-income families do better than their parents. Among all the factors they examined, one stood out: friendship across class lines, which they called "economic connectedness". Children who grew up in places where lower-income people had more friends from wealthier backgrounds went on to earn considerably more as adults. The researchers estimated that if low-income children grew up with the level of connectedness typical of high-income children, their adult incomes would rise by around 20 per cent on average.

The advantage doesn't disappear once you have a good job, either. In their book The Class Ceiling (2019), the sociologists Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison used the UK's Labour Force Survey to compare people working in elite professions. Those from privileged backgrounds earned on average 16 per cent more than colleagues from working-class backgrounds, and the gap persisted even when comparing people with the same education, role and experience.

The challenge may be growing. Monster's 2026 State of the Graduate report found that 89 per cent of American graduates worry AI could replace entry-level roles, up from 64 per cent a year earlier. When the formal routes into a career narrow, the informal ones matter more: referrals, internships found through a friend of a friend, a quiet word with the hiring manager. Those routes have always favoured people who are already connected.

None of this means the game is fixed. It means the rules have to be learned deliberately. This is what I tell the young people I mentor.

Build friendships across backgrounds on purpose. Chetty's team found that even when people from different backgrounds share the same spaces, they still tend to befriend people like themselves, a pattern they called "friending bias". Joining a society, volunteering or playing a team sport puts you in rooms where different people mix, but you still have to start the conversation.

Find a sponsor as well as mentors. A mentor gives you advice. A sponsor puts your name forward when you aren't in the room. Both are valuable, but it is usually a sponsor who changes the course of a career. Do good work for someone senior, keep them informed about what you are doing, and in time ask whether they would be willing to recommend you.

Treat the unwritten rules as skills, not verdicts. Not knowing how to network or negotiate says nothing about your ability. It simply means nobody taught you. Ask people you trust how things really work: how promotions get decided, what a fair first offer looks like, what you could have done differently in that meeting. Most people are happy to explain if you ask them.

Don't apologise for where you come from. The scholars I have seen do best are often those who learned early to cope with difficulty, to work without a safety net and to make the most of every opportunity. Those qualities are hard to teach, and over a long career they count for a great deal.

Finally, once you have learned the rules, pass them on. Some years ago, the Foundation's former scholars set up their own Pay It Forward fund, which now helps one or two students from China study at Oxford each year. To me, that is how social mobility really spreads: one person at a time, sharing what nobody ever shared with them.