‘African-Americans and Social Security Reform: Working on the White House National Economic Council’

Holy Cross senior Erin Robert has been selected by the College’s Center for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies as one of two recipients of the 2005 fall semester’s Maurizio Vannicelli Washington Semester Away program award. She will present her thesis, "Playing Politics with the Policy Process: African-Americans and Social Security Reform" on Nov. 3 at 4 p.m. in the Rehm Library.

While in Washington D.C., Robert interned at the White House working on the National Economic Council, where her work focused mostly on Social Security reform.

Robert’s talk will discuss both how African-Americans fare under the current Social Security system, and how reforming the system and creating Personal Retirement Accounts would benefit African-Americans.

"My thesis concluded that whatever proportional benefit African-Americans gain because of their low wages is outweighed by the costs associated with their comparatively low life expectancy," she explained. "Furthermore, I argued that Personal Retirement Accounts would afford African-Americans the ability to accumulate wealth as opposed to an income stream, which has many ancillary benefits; there are strong correlations between wealth and level of education, health, and even between asset holdings and incidence of mortality. Ultimately, African-Americans would benefit from the integration of Personal Retirement Accounts into the Social Security system not because it would necessarily increase their stream of benefits, but because they would be able to create wealth and the ability to pass an inheritance on to their children, slowly closing the wealth gap in this country."

Robert is a political science major from Broad Brook, Conn. She is currently serving as the co-chair for the Student Government Association and the off-campus group, Students for Saving Social Security, a national grassroots movement of college students advocating for the integration of Personal Retirement Accounts into the Social Security system. She is a former member of the Mock Trial team at Holy Cross.

The Vannicelli Prize is awarded each semester in honor of the late Holy Cross political science professor and Washington Semester director, Maurizio Vannicelli, for the best research paper produced in the Washington Semester Away program. Because judges deemed two papers as excellent this semester, two winners were chosen (the other is Timothy O’Brien ’06, who will be profiled in an upcoming Web feature). The recipients of the prize are accorded the opportunity to give a public lecture at the College on their thesis. In addition the winners receive a bound copy of the theses and are presented the book award during commencement exercises.