In the Fall of 2021, the Economics department launched a new visiting speaker series on Race, Privilege, and Inequality. The objective of this new series is to bring to campus economists who can speak knowledgeably to current issues surrounding racial inequality. 

2025 Lecture

This year’s Race, Privilege and Inequality Speaker Series lecturer is Fenaba R. Addo, Associate Professor of Public Policy at University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. Professor Addo specializes in debt and racial wealth inequality. She is the 4th speaker in the Economics department’s Race, Privilege and Inequality Visiting Speaker Series.

lecturer
Professor Fenaba Addo

“Middle Class Attainment in Young Adulthood: Higher Education and Racial Wealth Inequality” by Dr. Fenaba R. Addo

May 13, 2025, 4:00-5:00 p.m., Weitz 236

Lecture Summary: For whom is higher education an engine of economic mobility? How should we value post-secondary education in a society with extreme wealth inequality and massive student loan debt? This study examines racial wealth inequality in young adulthood, its relationship with higher education, and what is means to be middle class. Also discussed, is how the racialization of student debt is intimately connected with the racial wealth gap and how policies, like debt cancellation, may disrupt the association between wealth and higher education going forward and provide an opportunity to address the damages this relationship has created. 

Previous Lectures

  • April 15, 2024 – “Health Equity Issues among Immigrants and Hispanics: The Role of Economics and Immigration Policies“ by Dr. Monica Garcia-Perez, Professor in the Department of Economics, Herberger School of Business, St. Cloud State University; Visiting Senior Faculty, Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, Duke University
  • October 6, 2022 – “The Minnesota Paradox: Racial Inequality and Progressive Public Policy” by Samuel L. Myers, Jr., Roy Wilkins Professor of Human Relations and Social Justice, Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota
  • October 20, 2021 – “How Economists Think About Discrimination:  The Green Books and the Geography of Public Accommodations Segregation” by Dr. Trevor Logan, the Associate Dean and Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor of Economics, College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University.