Course list

This course introduces you to policy and data science surrounding income inequality and intergenerational mobility in the United States. You will begin with an in-depth background on sociology, demography, and economics along with an introduction to "big data'' and how it can be used in these fields of study to address complex policy problems. You will also explore essential functions in data science and the language of R before moving on to more complex statistics and data structures that will assist you in articulating big data. You will then investigate income inequality utilizing the Opportunity Atlas data project to examine geographic differences in intergenerational income mobility. Finally, you will further study this mobility across race, ethnicity, and gender, and you will engage in several opportunities to practice your new skill set in R, data, and policy analysis.

In this course, you will explore the data surrounding racial and ethnic inequalities in the United States, particularly in the areas of educational opportunity outcomes, residential segregation, and housing.

You will examine visualizations of big data and practice analyzing this data in order to understand and convey its implications. You will not only investigate how these issues are defined but also how to measure different forms of inequality, articulate their cause, and utilize the data for informing policy. You will explore the Educational Opportunity Project to develop your data analysis skill set by examining educational inequalities. You will then use R to visualize housing data and residential segregation. Finally, you will continue improving how your data is organized and shared by quantifying the social and economic impact of neighborhood housing and migration potential.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

  • Income Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility

The COVID-19 pandemic upended our lives in fundamental and enduring ways, impacting not only our health but also the economy, culture, and politics. In this course, you will examine health inequalities and outcomes across different groups in the United States, utilizing the policies and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as your framework. You will explore the impact of COVID-19 in such areas as employment, healthcare, energy use, patterns of movement, and consumer spending, and you will consider how policies implemented during the pandemic affected these variables for different groups in disparate ways. You will also examine remote data as well as a variety of spatial tools to help visualize the effect of pandemic-related policies.

By leveraging data, you will investigate how policies implemented during the pandemic affected health inequalities and outcomes for different groups in disparate ways across the United States, utilizing the policies and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as your framework.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

  • Income Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility
  • Impact of Racial-Ethnic Segregation on Education and Neighborhood Inequality

In this course, you will investigate big data and policy analysis as it is applied to issues of crime, incarceration, and policing practices. Drawing upon an economic perspective, you will examine policymaking in the criminal justice system and how it affects crime rates and mass incarceration trends. Incarceration has disproportionately impacted people of color in the United States, so you will also analyze trends of inequality in the United States criminal justice system and policing practices. Finally, you will explore how algorithms can be used with big data to inform policy and decision making, and you will practice building regression models to make predictions about crime rates.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

  • Income Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility
  • Impact of Racial-Ethnic Segregation on Education and Neighborhood Inequality
  • Social and Economic Impact of the Early COVID-19 Pandemic

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