Brookings Public Policy Minor
About the Minor
The Brookings Public Policy Minor (BPPM) is a unique educational experience that offers a multidisciplinary curriculum based upon local, national and global themes. The courses in the minor unite the best teaching and scholarship from UNLV faculty, with national experts and scholars from the Brookings Institution. This unique collaboration draws upon the diverse faculty and programmatic interests of UNLV to link knowledge, academic inquiry, and practice with the outstanding policy programs of the Brookings Institution.
The collaboration recognizes its responsibility to present multiple perspectives and enhance critical thinking and decision-making skills in a broad range of subject areas such as geography, economics, political science, public policy, and others. At a metropolitan university located in the heart of a diverse global city, the BPPM is committed to creating curriculum materials that model effective ways of working with students of all backgrounds. UNLV students are coming of age in a world of global markets where democratic forms of government emerge, struggle, and adapt amid a technological revolution that continues to alter how we think, act, and live on a daily basis. The BPPM addresses the challenge of effective teaching, learning, and communication in this ever-changing global environment. UNLV faculty and students, in collaboration with Brookings colleagues, will meet this challenge, and help build sustainable local, national, and global communities.
Student Guide: Brookings Public Policy Minor
In Brookings Minor courses, students will:
- Learn about real people in real places
- Link societies by their connections and commonalities as much as by their differences
- Integrate general issues of globalization, past and present, into the study of specific people and places in the world
- Include cross-disciplinary approaches to break down conventional academic barriers
- Emphasize experiential as well as classroom learning
- Foster research and information literacy through coordinated lectures, readings, and assignments
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Accomplishments
About the Curriculum
Each of the courses is centered around — and guided by scholars from — the five research programs at Brookings: Governance Studies, Economic Studies, Foreign Policy Studies, Global Economy and Development Research, and Metropolitan Studies.
Dedicated to analyzing policy issues, political institutions and processes, and contemporary governance challenges. Scholarship in this program identifies areas in need of reform and proposes specific solutions with the goals of: improving the performance of the national government; informing debate; and providing policymakers with expert analysis and ideas to ensure better institutional governance.
Analyzes current and emerging economic issues facing the United States and the world, focusing on ideas to achieve broad-based economic growth, a strong labor market, sound fiscal and monetary policy, and economic opportunity and social mobility. The research aims to increase understanding of how the economy works and what can be done to make it work better.
Program at Brookings is a leading center of policy-relevant scholarship exploring the rapidly re-ordering geopolitics of the great and major powers, and the disordering relations among states and transnational actors in the greater Middle East. Scholars provide concrete policy recommendations for how U.S. strategy, the international security architecture, and key allies should adapt to changing threats and opportunities.
- Aims to shape the policy debate on how to improve global economic cooperation and fight global poverty and sources of social stress. With a long-term vision of strong, sustainable, and balanced growth for a prosperous world, the program undertakes high-quality research, identifies target audiences and policy opportunities, and shares its findings to inform new policy solutions.
Strives to deliver research and solutions that help metropolitan leaders build an advanced economy that works for all.
Brookings Public Policy Minor - In the News
On Monday, it was publicly revealed that Chancellor Melody Rose of the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) will resign effective today.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect people across the United States, cities and states are struggling to combat vaccination gaps. This is especially true in Nevada, where the vaccination rate for Black residents is lagging behind that of white, Asian and Latino residents.
This chip manufacturing shortage presents a premier opportunity for economic development in the Silver State.
This week, authorities in South Africa announced that the country’s economy is 11 percent larger than previous estimates after Statistics South Africa altered its method for calculating gross domestic product.
Student Opinion Editorials
Brookings Public Policy Minor students are engaged in a variety of policy topics that impact the Las Vegas metropolitan region, the Mountain West, and the nation. Our students are frequently featured as "guest columnists" on critical public policy topics in local newspapers.
Chace Avecilla
Jessica Balistreri
Sebastian Cardenas
Kyle Catarata
Madison Frazee
Elia Del Carmen Solano-Patricio
Katelin Gilbertson
Faculty and Engagement
Brookings scholars currently engage with UNLV faculty both in the classroom and in related research efforts.
For example, Ron Haskins, Senior Fellow, Economic Studies and Co-Director of Center on Children and Families speaks to undergraduate classes during his visits, and partnered with Vicky Albert, UNLV professor of social work, on a Pew Charitable trust-funded examination of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program.
Adele Morris, Senior Fellow, Economic Studies and Policy Director for Climate and Energy Economics, and UNLV professor of economics, Brad Wimmer, created an economic policy course that serves as a model for courses in the minor.
Similarly, Steven Landis, an assistant professor of political science, offers a foreign policy course that engages with a number of Brookings scholars. As future Brookings scholars collaborate with UNLV faculty across campus, we hope to develop additional courses.
Each Brookings Public Policy Minor course is taught by a UNLV faculty member in collaboration with one or more Brookings colleagues. This partnership includes one or more Brookings scholars’ in-person teaching of selected class lectures for the courses in the program. It also may involve participating in review of assignments and grading, and additional teaching through the use of electronic classrooms.