Announcing the 2023 Richard P. Taub Thesis Prize Winners

The Richard P. Taub Thesis Prize, created in 2018, is awarded annually to three undergraduate Public Policy Studies students who have done original and extensive research for the BA thesis project, the major’s capstone experience.

“The Public Policy Studies Class of 2023 would have something substantial to be proud of just by overcoming the disruption (and worse) of a pandemic. Somehow, they also managed, across the board, to produce excellent academic work,” said James A. Leitzel, Senior Lecturer and Executive Director, Undergraduate Program. “Our 2023 Taub Prize winners are emblematic of the entire class and of the heart of our major: taking a multidisciplinary approach to better understand pressing public issues and to identify paths to better outcomes.”

The award is named after Richard P. Taub, a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, who was instrumental in the 1970s in the creation of the Public Policy major, now housed at the Harris School of Public Policy.

“Among the three of them, Samuel, Titilayo, and Ricky used interviews, surveys, and instrumental variable regressions to examine media impacts on Medicaid take-up, the role of interpretations of religion in sustaining domestic violence, and the strategies adopted by foster children in an effort to bring some stability to their lives,” Leitzel added. “Public Policy Studies offers a broad tent, both methodologically and with respect to specific policy areas, and we are delighted to be able to shelter such wonderful, diverse projects, within our intellectual home.”

The Taub Thesis Prize winners are:

Samuel Abers

Samuel Abers received his Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy Studies and Economics, with a Data Science specialization. He is especially interested in applied economic and policy research. Sam worked as a research assistant at MiiE Lab. For the thesis, Sam gathered and analyzed around 4,200 news articles from CNN and Fox News and coded positive, neutral, and negative sentiments towards Medicaid. He takes advantage of the variation in the timing of the introduction of the policy in the 2010's and estimates an instrumental variable model to establish a causal relationship between negative sentiments and the uptake of Medicaid.

Thesis: “Media Effects on Medicaid Uptake: How Does Bad Press Hurt Policy Implementation?”

Titilayo Arowolo

Titilayo Arowolo received her Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy Studies with a Gender and Sexuality Studies minor. She served as the Co Executive Director for neXus Dance Collective and worked as a Senior Career Peer Advisor. She is an incoming business analyst at McKinsey and Company.

Arowolo channels her passion for social change and problem solving on the amalgamation of the public-private sector for the socio-economic development of African Women.

Titi's research is ambitious on several fronts. She develops a multidisciplinary approach and ties together scholarly literature from sociology, feminist studies, and religious/cultural studies. She gathers data from a survey of 81 Nigerian women and she conducts in-depth interviews with 16 other women in Nigeria or who belong to the Nigerian diaspora. Her findings show that religion is one of the ways in which domestic violence persists and she gives detailed account of the mechanisms.

Thesis: “The Fall of Eve: Exploring How the Nigerian Christian Community applies Religious Principles into the Household and Situations of Intimate Partner Violence.”

Ricky Holder

Ricky Holder is a Navy veteran and received his Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy Studies. He served as the Co-Chair of the Student Advisory Board at the Institute of Politics and interned with the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic at the Law School. Ricky was one of three students selected as Class Day Student Speaker during convocation celebrations at The University of Chicago.

As a Marshal Scholar, Ricky will pursue an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy at the University of Oxford. After completing his MPhil, Holder is considering working for family defense clinics, which pair public defenders with families who are at risk of being separated and help to extricate children from the foster system once they are placed in it.

Having spent the second half of his childhood in the foster care system, separated from his mother and four brothers, Holder knows first hand the changes that need to be put in place. No matter which path he chooses, his motivation will remain constant: to fix the system by ending the unnecessary dissolution of families and helping ensure positive outcomes for foster youth.

Ricky does a great job describing the literature that connects different outcomes affected by the disruption of placement in foster youth. The main contribution of his thesis, is the analysis of 37 interviews of individuals who were part of the foster care system. He gives them a voice and this project becomes one of the first studies that gives agency to this population and develops in detail all the strategies (Suffering in silence, strategic adaptation, and cautious back-channeling) in order to avoid disruption.

Thesis: “The Evil You Know: How Teenage Foster Youth in California Attempt to Reduce Placement Instability.”