A new online course focused on poverty and inequality in the United States will launch Oct. 11 and run until Dec. 15, 2016. Developed by Stanford University, the course is free and open to the public and features Cecilia Elena Rouse, dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Lawrence and Shirley Katzman and Lewis and Anna Ernst Professor in the Economics of Education.
"America’s Course on Poverty" is designed to allow all who are interested to learn from the nation’s top scholars, who will present 40 key research results on poverty and inequality. Leaders in the field discuss why there is so much poverty and inequality, and how both might be reduced.
Appearing by video, Rouse discusses gender discrimination in the labor market. As an example, she describes the longstanding gender inequality among instrumentalists in symphony orchestras and how the adoption of blind auditions affected hiring. Her study found that introducing a screen into auditions accounted for approximately one-third of the increase in new female hires and one-quarter of the increase in all female musicians. By implementing blind auditions, symphony orchestras changed their hiring practices to meet their most important need — identifying the most skilled instrumentalists.
The online course, developed by Stanford’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, features eight standalone modules that each contain jargon-free videos. Each module is introduced and explained by course instructors David B. Grusky, the director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, and Lindsay Owens, an economic policy advisor in the office of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
No prerequisites are required, and the course is estimated to require two to four hours of effort per week. Visit the enrollment page to register.