|
|
|
   
   
|
HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES Social Policy Graduate Program Gets NSF Funding
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a team of Harvard faculty a five-year, $2.5 million grant to launch the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy, a unique training initiative for Harvard Ph.D. candidates in economics, government, sociology, and public policy. The program will provide students with a powerful interdisciplinary complement to their traditional training, and bring together faculty for a variety of interactive and collaborative training and research efforts. The Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard University Office of the Provost also will contribute significant funding to the program. "The dramatic recent changes in inequality and social policy pointed to the need for new and better training and research in this domain," explained Katherine Newman, Ford Foundation Professor of Urban Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. "Because the causes and consequences of these changes transcend traditional disciplines, a multidisciplinary program of enhanced training for existing Ph.D. students seemed appropriate. Fortunately, at Harvard we are blessed with an unusual concentration of outstanding faculty studying these questions. This initiative exemplifies Harvard's ability to reach across the boundaries between schools and departments to create something that maximizes the University's considerable intellectual resources and potential." The NSF's new Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) grants for the natural and social sciences offered a unique opportunity to build a multidisciplinary training program where existing Ph.D. students would deepen their work on inequality issues within their disciplines and broaden their exposure to work outside of their disciplines. Moreover, such a training program would serve as a vehicle for bringing together faculty from across the University and around the country. Principal investigators David T. Ellwood, Newman, and William Julius Wilson, all faculty at the Kennedy School, worked to craft a program in collaboration with more than 30 of their Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Kennedy School, Graduate School of Education, and Law School faculty colleagues. Only 18 of 660 applications for support were funded. "We are quite fortunate to receive this support," said Ellwood, program director for 1998-99 and Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy at the Kennedy School. "Now it is up to us to create the first-rate program that the NSF reviewers expected." Selected doctoral students gain admittance to the program in their second or third year of graduate school. The central training vehicle is the program's three-semester interdisciplinary Proseminar in Inequality & Social Policy, a small graduate seminar taught by Christopher Jencks, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Kennedy School, with regular participation from other program faculty who lead discussions in their areas of expertise. In addition, the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy provides the weekly Wiener Inequality & Social Policy Seminar Series, a National Fellows program, an annual Summer Institute, research apprenticeships, state-of-the-art computer facilities, and a variety of formal and informal opportunities for students to interact with faculty and other doctoral students outside their home departments. Doctoral students also participate with faculty in leading the Galbraith Scholars program, a weeklong summer undergraduate session designed to introduce minority or economically disadvantaged students to educational and career opportunities in the field of inequality and social policy. The Multidisciplinary Program identifies six substantive areas of specialization that broadly define the scope of Inequality & Social Policy concerns: (1) Work, Wages, and the Marketplace, (2) Neighborhoods and Spatial Segregation, (3) Family Structure and Parental Roles, (4) Immigration, Race, and Labor Market Segregation, (5) Education Access and Quality, and (6) Social and Economic Policy. All program faculty teach and conduct ongoing research projects in at least one of these thematic areas. Through their qualifying paper and research apprenticeship experiences, all student participants gain opportunities to work closely with program faculty, including faculty outside their home departments whom they might not otherwise meet. The National Fellows component further broadens the scholarly resources of the Program by introducing students to leading faculty working on issues of inequality and social policy at other academic institutions. The National Fellows establish an ongoing relationship with the program, agreeing to visit Harvard periodically, attend the Summer Institute, and serve generally as a resource for the doctoral student participants. Many of these Fellows present their current research at the Wiener Inequality & Social Policy Seminar Series and then meet in small groups or one-on-one with the program students. The 19 current National Fellows include: John Bound (economist, University of Michigan), Jeanne Brooks-Gunn (sociologist, Columbia University Teachers College), Thomas Cook (sociologist, Northwestern University), Sheldon Danziger (economist, University of Michigan), Greg Duncan (economist, Northwestern University), Kathryn Edin (sociologist, University of Pennsylvania), Roberto Fernandez (sociologist, Stanford Graduate School of Business), Frank Furstenberg (sociologist, University of Pennsylvania), Jennifer Hochschild (political scientist, Princeton University), Harry Holzer (economist, Michigan State University), Alan Krueger (economist, Princeton University), Steven Levitt (economist, University of Chicago), Susan Mayer (sociologist, University of Chicago), Sara McLanahan (sociologist, Princeton University), Lawrence Mead (political scientist, New York University), Robert Moffitt (economist, Johns Hopkins University), Ann Shola Orloff (sociologist, Northwestern University), John Stephens (political scientist, University of North Carolina), and R. Kent Weaver (political scientist, The Brookings Institution). The first cohort of doctoral students gained admittance to the program in September. Twelve students were selected in a competitive application process for the first year, with the anticipation that 6 to 10 students would be admitted in subsequent years. The students and their home departments are: Susan Crawford (Sociology), Dan Devroye (Political Economy and Government), Rachel Deyette (Political Economy and Government), Andrew Karch (Government), Shelley McDonough (Sociology), Alicia Sasser (Economics), Mario Small (Sociology), Ruth Turley (Sociology), Celeste Watkins (Sociology), Justin Wolfers (Economics), Jessica Wolpaw (Economics), and Dan Zuberi (Public Policy). Graduate student participants receive generous tuition and stipend support over several years in the program. They also may receive additional awards for special research needs, and office space when available within the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Kennedy School. Once admitted, students will generally remain program participants throughout the dissertation period. Harvard University Participants Program Director (1998-1999): David T. Ellwood Governing Committee: Lawrence F. Katz, Katherine S. Newman, Paul Pierson, William Julius Wilson, and Christopher Winship. Program Coordinator: Pamela L. Metz Faculty Participants:
|
