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A focus on poverty: the Shepherd Program at Washington and Lee University.

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"I DON'T THINK very many students know that." Assaba Massougodji spoke these words after learning that the United States was ranked by the United Nations Development Programme as having a higher poverty rate than any developed nation. (Italy and Ireland, for different reasons, have subsequently slipped in the rankings and are now measured as having a higher percentage of their population in poverty than the United States does.) Assaba, an immigrant from Togo and a college junior at the time, was not aware that her adopted nation has a greater poverty problem than most developed nations. She did not know that, according to the income measurement of poverty established by the federal government, nearly 13 percent of U.S. residents and almost 18 percent of U.S. children live in poor households; that the U.S. infant mortality rate is higher than that of all other developed nations, including Slovenia and South Korea; or that the percentage of citizens expected to live past 65 years of age is lower in the United States than in Costa Rica. Assaba is socially concerned and not atypical; few of her peers at Washington and Lee and other colleges and universities in the United States are better informed about poverty. Although they realize that poverty, malnutrition, and morbidity are rampant in parts of the developing world, they have little understanding of the causes and are largely ignorant of both the magnitude and the causes of poverty in the United States.

The Shepherd Program for the Interdisciplinary Study of Poverty and Human Capability at Washington and Lee University was established in 1997 to educate the faculty and our relatively wealthy students about a social problem of which they had very little knowledge and even less firsthand experience. At the time, we did not know that there were no other interdisciplinary undergraduate programs for the sustained study of poverty in the United States. We were unaware that undergraduates at other colleges and universities also had only limited opportunities to learn about poverty and human development.

Although the goals of the Shepherd Program have evolved, two shine more brightly than they did when the program began ten years ago: (1) to inform a significant percentage of students about poverty, its causes, and plausible remedies; and (2) to offer twenty...

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