Letter from the Director | Winter 2006-2007
Holiday Season
It is the holiday season, even if unseasonably warm. ISERP highlights from the fall include our symposium on the 2006 election, which featured Bob Erikson's accurate prediction of the democratic legislative sweep, the arrival of Amira Ibrahim from Goldman Sachs to manage the financial activities of ISERP (we are all anticipating record bonuses next year-any bonus would, of course be a record, so...), and news of substantial Mellon Foundation support for an enhanced and expanded Graduate Fellows program linking the humanities to the social sciences and providing new opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and leadership training. As usual, new seed grants have gone out to support external grant applications. The news from NSF panels that met in the fall suggest that the seed grant program remains successful with more than a handful of ISERP faculty receiving funding or strong invitations for revision and resubmission to the next round.
We continue to seek out opportunities to support the building of new collaborative research ventures. Led by colleagues in Social Work (Irv Garfinkel and Jane Waldfogel), Public Health (Constance Nathanson, Richard Parker, and John Santelli), and Arts and Sciences (Tom DiPrete and Janet Currie), among others, ISERP is contributing to a University wide effort to develop synergies within the demographic/population community in the hopes of facilitating a successful application for a population center that can provide integrated resources for work in global health, urbanization, child and family health and policy, HIV, immigration, and other core issues central to the demographic community. Part of this effort is seed grant investment with Social Intervention Group (SIG) researchers at the School of Social Work in founding a research center in Kazakhstan that will provide local expertise for a series of joint projects on HIV diffusion dynamics in Central Asia.
The substantive focus of this newsletter is education. Over the past few years, Florencia Torche (Center for Wealth and Inequality) wrote a series of fascinating papers on social mobility in Chile, arising from data she collected as part of the first national study of intergenerational mobility dynamics there-incidentally, Florencia has just completed a similar study in Mexico. Some of the most intriguing questions relating to the Chilean experience arise from the introduction of a national voucher system for primary and secondary education. In this issue, Miguel Urquiola describes ongoing work he is conducting to assess the impact of the voucher system. Understanding how vouchers work in Chile will help us evaluate proposals for similar programs in the United States.
We are also working hard to enhance and expand our curricular impacts. Mellon funding for the graduate program will provide resources for short courses; we continue to work hard with the Oral History Research Office to develop a master's program in Oral History, a collaboration that arises from our joint research on 9/11 and now, the Council on Foreign Relations. Our Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences (QMSS) master's program is thriving, and we anxiously await approval from Albany for the dual QMSS-SIPA M.A. degree. And finally, we are getting ready for the onslaught of applicants for the high school student intern program. Faculty at ISERP should consider whether they have an opportunity appropriate for a student researcher for six weeks in the summer. ISERP provides a small stipend for students, who typically work 30 hours or so a week.
In the old days we might have said something appropriate for the winter holiday like "keep warm." That seems hardly difficult, unfortunately.
Peter Bearman, Director
Institute of Social and Economic
Research and Policy
