ABSTRACT
Educating undergraduates at American universities about poverty via an integrated series of courses leading to a minor is a small, but steadily growing, phenomenon. These efforts to strengthen undergraduate poverty education stem from a desire to aid the poor, but also from the need to provide students with the tools they need to develop an ethical orientation that can challenge the basic assumptions of neoliberal economics and policies that tend to dominate undergraduate education in the areas of business and economics on American campuses. As noted by Craig Murphy (2001, p. 354) amongst others (Stiglitz, 2012), it is vital that we educate undergraduate students on the consequences likely to arise “in a world in which some of us are so relatively rich and others so relatively poor.” Echoing Murphy’s concerns, Krian and Shadle (2006, p. 52) note:
