On a bitterly cold January day, close to 20 junior-year students perform a monthly ritual, filing into a third-floor conference room at Boston’s Madison Park Technical Vocational High School on Malcolm X Boulevard in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood. Meeting them here are young professionals from Ernst & Young (EY) who’ve abandoned their cubicles for a few hours to lead a team mentoring session with low-income, first-generation students who aspire to go to college.

Mentors and mentees are young...

When a young woman returns to a place of painful experience — bullying, debilitating shyness, financial problems and low self-esteem — there are bound to be strong emotions. For Erica Elder, who came home to Bassett High School in southern Virginia last fall to be a college adviser and mentor, the first day back was, well …

“At first it was really weird, walking into school as faculty,” Elder says.

Three years after earning a high school diploma from Bassett, Elder had returned a different per...

You’re from Long Island, the son of a man in the apparel business and a mother who didn’t work outside the home until you were 10. Having attended junior college, your parents insist — without ever really saying so — that you will go further. Absorbing their expectations, you graduate from high school and attend the University of Wisconsin, earning a bachelor’s degree in international relations in four years.

Degree in hand, you return to New York City, but not to Long Island. You land a covete...