A five-year California-wide research study aiming to more completely understand the job-market and college-access problems of low-income youth will be led by education professors at UC San Diego and UCLA, under a just announced $7.6 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“We know that for low-income youth, understanding the barriers to post-high school education is the key to creating solutions,” said Amanda Datnow, professor of education studies at UC San Diego, and co-director of the study. “We are confident this work will advance the policy choices in the fight against poverty in America,” added Datnow.

Immediate work getting under way in San Diego includes in-depth study of low-income youth of this region, especially those who have failed on the traditional paths to high school completion and college entrance.  This work will be undertaken at UC San Diego by the university’s education research center, CREATE (Center for Research on Educational Equity, Access and Teaching Excellence.)

“Our education specialists at UC San Diego are ideally suited for this kind of in-depth research where the home and environmental lives of young people come slamming into problems in school,” said Jeff Elman, dean of Social Sciences. “We have a deep and lasting commitment to research that must help break the cycle of poverty and despair among many of our young people,” he added.

The grant, part of a Gates Foundation program, called “Breaking the Intergenerational Cycle of Poverty through Post-secondary Education,”  folds into ongoing University of California education research effort known as the “All Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity,” part of the UC continuing public service work to reduce poverty and expand opportunities to low-income young people of color.