While the college attendance rate of children from the highest income families has risen to nearly 90 percent, attendance rates for children from low-income families hovers around 50 percent. Whereas the focus of financial aid has historically been on easing the tuition burden for low-income families that might not otherwise be able to afford college, the movement towards merit-based aid is attracting more students from middle- and high-income families while apparently crowding out students from low-income families.

Low-income workers not only tend to work in more hazardous, physically intensive jobs than their higher-income counterparts, but they also must deal with the social stresses of making ends meet and living in impoverished environments. Not surprisingly, their life expectancies are shorter than those of higher earners. But which factors contribute most to this bleak outcome for blue-collar workers: socioeconomic stresses or workplace woes?

America’s founders were famously fearful that unchecked democracy would lead to the expropriation of property from the wealthy few by the more numerous poor. Yet, as income inequality has inched steadily upwards over the last 30 years, the public policy response has not been greater distribution, but oftentimes less. Taxes on investment income and inheritance have fallen, while the payroll tax has been raised.

College graduates currently earn almost twice as much on average as those with a high school diploma or less. Obtaining a bachelor’s degree has become an increasingly important step for those seeking economic and social advancement, but evidence indicates that college is no longer within reach for many low-income Americans. With support from the Foundation, Stacy Dickert-Conlin and Ross Rubenstein of Syracuse University will host a conference in September 2005 exploring the reasons why income-related gaps in higher education access and completion remain large and may be expanding.

With medical expenditures now totaling 15 percent of the national economy, the United States spends more on health care than any other nation, yet it lags behind other industrialized nations on many standard health indicators, such as life expectancy and infant mortality. James S. House, Robert F. Schoeni, George Kaplan, and Harold Pollack believe that this discrepancy between health spending and health outcomes may be partially explained by the health effects of non-health spending and policy.

With inequality on the rise over the past three decades, many have pointed to America's higher education system as a pathway to intergenerational improvement for the children of the poor and working class. But with high tuition rates and admissions policies often favoring the children of alumni, there is reason to doubt whether college-going is a realistic vehicle for the poor to achieve social progress.

Increasingly, legal scholars and empirical social scientists have collaborated to examine social issues and possible legal responses. However, little cooperative work thus far has been done on inequality. As a result, many social scientists have an overly simplistic view of the law’s ability to be put in place, interpreted effectively, and used to combat inequality. At the same time, legal scholars have a poor grasp on the empirical research done on inequality.

The combination of “work-first” legislation and a booming economy in the 1990s propelled many poor individuals into employment and off of welfare. But for all too many poor families, marginal gains in income were washed out by new costs for transportation, child care, health insurance, and housing. With support from the Foundation, Carolyn Heidrich, John Karl Scholz, and Thomas Kaplan will organize a multidisciplinary conference in September, 2007 to develop more effective policies for enhancing self-sufficiency and financial independence among the working poor.

Over the past two decades, an average of two million people immigrated each year to the United States and Europe. Their native countries receive billions of dollars and euros annually in remittances, in some cases accounting for up to thirty percent of these countries’ GDP. In North America and in Europe immigration is generally thought to ameliorate labor force shortages and provide demographic and economic vitality and expand the consumer and tax bases, even as it raises challenges.

A variety of changes have taken place in health care policy over the past three decades, but it is not clear whether the net effects of these changes have acted to moderate or magnify economic inequalities. Economist Claudia Schur and sociologists Marc Berk and Jacob Feldman will address this question by constructing a careful inventory of relevant health policy changes over the past thirty years. They will then estimate the distribution of costs and benefits to different population groups from major health related expenditures.