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How Equal Is Opportunity?

Join David Harris, deputy provost, vice provost for social sciences, and professor of sociology, and other top research faculty from across Cornell University in a four-part seminar series examining issues of inequality and social and economic mobility. Explore--through the multifaceted lens of the social sciences--factors that affect why one person succeeds and another does not. How, for example, do inequalities change? Why do they persist? What impact do they have on access to education and other opportunities?

Opportunity 101: What Affects Access?

Poverty is not an event with a specific cure so much as the end result of a "cascading process.” David Harris shares his research on the dynamics of poverty in the United States. Learn more

Opportunity 102: Inequality in Education

Steve Morgan, associate professor of sociology and director of the Cornell Center for the Study of Inequality, looks at current research on the relationship between inequality and education. Learn more

Opportunity 103: Inequality at Work

Francine Blau, the Frances Perkins Professor of Labor Economics in the ILR School and chair of Cornell’s Economics Council, explores the fundamental sources of rising wage inequality and the impact these trends have had on more and less educated workers, whites and minorities, and men and women. Learn more

Opportunity 104: Inequality in Developing Countries

Chris Barrett, the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management and leader of the 2008-2011 theme project for the Institute for the Social Sciences, examines persistent poverty and upward mobility in developing countries and looks at private and public sector initiatives aimed at unlocking the poverty traps that presently hold back as many as two billion people globally. Learn more