School's In Session with Free Poverty Syllabi

Even if you've long since graduated from college, or didn't go, never fear -- school is not out. Dozens of college professors are sharing syllabi from their recent poverty-related courses with the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. Skimming through them is a great way to find out what people who study poverty full-time are reading and thinking about. When you begin to see overlap from syllabus to syllabus, you can feel confident in having a fairly firm grasp of the current academic trends. Flipping through these is also a great way to get a reading list of books to stack beside your bed to hold your water glass. That's just me? Oh. Moving on ....

When picking and choosing (the luxury of not actually being in the class), each syllabus has a lot to teach. Professor Ezra Rosser at American University requires his "Poverty and Law" students to read two 2006 articles from The New Yorker: "Relatively Deprived," about the origins, and failings, of the federal poverty level, and "Million Dollar Murray," about an affable but afflicted homeless man who cost the city of Reno, Nevda untold sums in public services. Rosser also has his students take the poverty quiz from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and read large portions of John Iceland's book Poverty in America and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed.

In Iceland's own course, "Poverty and Welfare" at the University of Maryland, he asks students to review the NPR/Kaiser/Kennedy School poll on poverty in America that provides a disheartening overview of how most Americans view their neighbors living in poverty. He has also made required reading of "The Rise of the Super Rich," from the New York Times from 2006. Another benefit of an academic syllabus is the potential to be exposed to views different from your own. Iceland, for example includes more liberal resources next to a piece from the conservative Heritage Foundation: "Increasing Marriage Would Dramatically Reduce Child Poverty."

At New York University, you can follow along with Professor W. Jean Yeung's course on "Contemporary Social Problems: Poverty." It also requires Iceland's book, as well as American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare by Jason DeParle and When Work Disappears by William J. Wilson. You won't have the benefit of an in-class lecture from DeParle, of course, but you will have the latest academic thinking on the issues surrounding poverty in America. And no student loans.

via Poverty Law

Photo credit: velkr0