As part of its ongoing effort to advance and disseminate knowledge on equality of opportunity, the Center for the Study of Inequality will host the “Social Mobility in an Unequal World: Evidence and Policy Solutions” conference April 20-22. The conference is free but RSVPs to inequality@cornell.edu are required.
The conference will bring together university-based academics, policy researchers and foundation representatives to share research and ideas on wealth and income mobility, the role of education in shaping how advantage and disadvantage is passed down through generations, welfare policies and their effects on inherited poverty and immigration policy and its unanticipated consequences for children’s health and educational attainment.
“In this era of rising income inequality, growing support for market-based educational reforms, weakening social safety nets and tightening immigration policy, it’s crucial to understand how opportunities for the next generation are changing and which policies are most effective in equalizing opportunities for children, regardless of their social background,” said Kim Weeden, the chair of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Inequality.
The keynote speech, “Inequality and the American Dream,” will be given by David Grusky at 4:30 p.m., April 20 in Rm. G10, Biotechnology Building. The talk is free and the public is welcome.
Grusky is the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality and coeditor of Pathways Magazine. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1987. His research addresses the changing structure of late-industrial inequality; he is also involved in projects to improve the country’s infrastructure for monitoring poverty, inequality and mobility by exploiting administrative and other forms of “big data” more aggressively. His recent books include “Social Stratification,” “Occupy the Future,” “The New Gilded Age,” “The Great Recession” and “The Inequality Puzzle.”
A morning keynote address, “Reducing Inequality in an Era of Alternative Facts: What Can Researchers and Research Funders Do?” will be offered to conference attendees by Adam Gamoran, president of the William T. Grant Foundation and MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Educational Policy Studies, Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison. His talk will be at 8:45 a.m., April 21 in the Yale Princeton Room of the Statler Hotel. Limited seats are available for non-conference participants by reservation; contact inequality@cornell.edu by April 16 if interested.
This article originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.
