Audio from the Urban Institute

School of Hard Shocks: Should Everyone Go to College

The road to the American dream has a four-year pit stop on a college quadrangle. This fall, more than 18 million collegians, including 4 million freshmen, will test that axiom amid an agitated economy and rising concerns about college affordability. Meanwhile, several million new would-be workers - college and high school grads and dropouts - are fighting for good jobs.

Catastrophic Budget Failure

Len Burman, former director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, explains why our spending and borrowing policies are leading the country toward catastrophic budget failure. Burman argues that the Congressional Budget Office's bleak economic forecasts are too optimistic, so we must act quickly to reduce our deficits. Len Burman is an Urban Institute Affiliated Scholar and the Daniel Patrick Moynihan professor of public policy at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

Ousting Obesity: Strategies from the Tobacco Wars

As waistlines expand, life spans are shrinking. If recent trends continue, more than 40 percent of Americans will be obese within the next 10 years, and for the first time in the nation's history, life expectancy will decline rather than grow. The obese and overweight suffer chronic illness, poor health, and more than 100,000 preventable deaths each year. Obesity causes over $200 billion in annual health care spending, about half of which is borne by taxpayers. Further, private health insurance premiums for nonobese workers are nearly $26 billion higher annually due to obesity-generated costs.

Child Welfare: Uniting Leadership, Policy, and Research to Serve Vulnerable Children and Families

Too often, child welfare policy and the agencies responsible for it—offices that respond to child abuse and neglect, oversee foster care placements, and seek to reunite children with their parents or find adoptive families—are out of sight and out of mind except for fleeting moments of tragedy, such as a child's death. Yet this topic is crucial: many children come into contact with child welfare agencies each year, and far more live in highly vulnerable families with some of the same challenges and risks. Further, leaders' successes and failures dealing with these extraordinarily difficult issues hold lessons for other areas of public policy and agency reform.

Step One: Pass Health Reform Legislation. Step Two: Administer Reforms.

Join leading health policy researchers for a lively discussion and the release of a new report, Administrative Solutions in Health Reform, a thorough analysis for policymakers and policy watchers of how to break through potential management impasses so complicated new policies can quickly become effective practices.

On the Road to Adulthood

Many young people in the District of Columbia lack a high school or college diploma and are ill-prepared for a labor market that demands highly skilled workers. In response to this crisis, the District government launched a reform effort in 2007 that promises to reinvent public schools and halt the years of poor performance that have plagued the city's education system. But school reform alone cannot address all of the complicated social, emotional, and economic conditions holding back the city's youth. Families, nonprofit organizations, and District agencies must all be committed partners in helping young people succeed.