Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series—The Center for Research on Families warmly welcomes Dr. James E. Rosenbaum, Professor of Education and Social Policy and Sociology at Northwestern University to the UMass campus as part of the Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series. 

For the past two decades, James Rosenbaum has conducted an extensive research project on the effects of relocating poor inner-city black families in public housing to subsidized housing in the white middle-class suburbs of Chicago. This quasi-natural experiment, known as the Gautreaux Program, has enabled him to study the effects of these moves on children's educational outcomes and job opportunities, as well as the social and economic effects on the mothers.

These studies encouraged the federal government to create its Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program, now being implemented by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, to which he serves as a consultant. A specialist in research on work, education, and housing opportunities, Rosenbaum has published four books and numerous articles on these subjects. In related work, Rosenbaum studied the effects of a mixed-income housing project, Lake Parc Place in Chicago, on adult employment and children's education, among other outcomes. The project also analyzed how the Chicago Housing Authority designed and implemented the program and its impact on the surrounding neighborhood.

More recently, Rosenbaum has been studying the high school to work transition, in Beyond College For All, a book awarded the Waller Prize in Sociology. He has also been studying community colleges, the ways they reduce many barriers to college, and reforms that create further improvements. He is also studying ways high schools can improve college access and college completion for disadvantaged students. A specialist in research on work, education and housing opportunities, Rosenbaum has published five books and numerous articles on these subjects. He has testified before Congressional committees on several occasions. He serves as an adviser for several national programs.

This lecture is sponsored by the Center for Research on Families’ Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series. The Center for Research on Families (CRF) is an endowed interdisciplinary research center in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and College of Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series brings internationally recognized speakers with expertise in family research to campus each year. The lecture series began in 1999 through an endowment established in memory of Tay Gavin Erickson.