In his State of the Union Address this month, President Obama called for a much- needed increase to the federal minimum wage. Almost four million American workers are paid at or below the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour for their work, adding up to about $15,000 per year, per person for a full-time, 40 hour per week job. This doesn’t come close to covering the cost of living for a single person, let alone a family. In the food retail…

Raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 should be a no-brainer. Republicans say it will cause employers to shed jobs, but that’s baloney. Employers won’t outsource the jobs abroad or substitute machines for them because jobs at this low level of pay are all in the local personal service sector (retail, restaurant, hotel, and so on), where employers pass on any small wage hikes to customers as pennies more on their bills. States that have a minimum…

What would it really take to give students a first-rate education? Some argue that our schools are irremediably broken and that charter schools offer the only solution. The striking achievement of Union City, N.J. — bringing poor, mostly immigrant kids into the educational mainstream — argues for reinventing the public schools we have. Union City makes an unlikely poster child for education reform. It’s a poor community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average.…

Students 18-24 years old can get help from everything from handshakes to computer programming in their quest to go to college or get a job, thanks to Jay Banfield (MPP ‘97) and the program he founded, Year Up. “There is a real skills gap in our country,” says Jay.

Professor Hilary Hoynes, a noted public finance and labor economist currently at the University of California, Davis, will join the GSPP faculty on July 1, 2013. She will also have an appointment in the Economics Department. She will hold the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities. Professor Hoynes studies poverty, inequality, and the impacts of government tax and transfer programs on low income families. Her current projects include evaluating the impact of the Great Recession across demographic groups, examining the impact of…

Chancellor's Professor Robert Reich teams up with filmmaker Jocob Kornbluth in a feature documentary exploring America's widening income inequality. Inequality for All premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival to strong reviews. In the documentary--much of which was filmmed at the Goldman School and the UC Berkeley campus--Professor Reich clearly and compellingly explains the current econonimc malaise in light of three decades of rising economic inequality.  "We’re hoping Inequality for All will do for the…

Until Friday morning, Newtown, Conn., pop. 27,560, was known, if at all, as the place where Scrabble was invented. Its residents - well-off - liked it that way. Then came the massacre: 26 dead, including 20 elementary schoolchildren. The event changes everything, not just for Newtown but for America. In recent years, we've grown wearily familiar with killings in high schools. These horrific events happen with seeming randomness, not in hot-spots like Harlem or Watts but in burgs scattered across the nation,…

The basic question driving the 2012 campaign was always clear: could Mitt Romney gain enough of the vote among older, upper-income white Americans to overcome President Obama’s overwhelming advantage among young, low-income and minority voters? As in previous elections, richer voters leaned Republican while lower-income voters came out strong as Democrats. But there’s much more to this story. The maps we have made show that the election was not just about red and blue states. What&rsquo…

To educators from around the globe, the California State University system is lauded as a triumph of mass higher education. Its 23 campuses enroll more undergraduates - 426,000 - than any other four-year higher education system in the United States. For CSU students, many of them the first in their family to attend college and many of them minorities, higher education is the ticket out of poverty and into the New Economy. What's good for these students is…

The Goldman school once again welcomes 30 outstanding college juniors from across the nation to the Public Policy International Affairs Junior Summer Institute, a seven-week, intensive immersion into the world of public policy. The program, with its focus on empowering and better serving historically under-served communities, offers rigorous coursework designed to sharpen the analytic and quantitative skills vital to success at top-level graduate programs in public policy, international affairs and law. The curriculum includes classes in policy analysis, economics, quantitative analysis,…