Throughout the academic year, the Institute of Politics challenges UChicago students to propose solutions to major issues in local, national, and global politics. The winning team of our Fall 2026 challenge will be awarded $500 per team member.
In teams of 2 to 4 students, propose a policy for improving education outcomes in our local community. The winning team will receive $500 per team member.
American public school children have broadly failed to recover from large-scale disruptions to learning during the COVID pandemic, and states and local districts are struggling to help students bounce back., According to federal testing data, reading skills of American high school seniors are the worst they have been in three decades. Many scored below basic math proficiency as well. The rise of heavy screen time and video-dominated media — which all predate the pandemic — has further eroded learning. The impacts span both well-resourced and underfunded districts, across racial divides, and cover urban, suburban, and rural school systems. As the federal government retreats from its role in K-12 education, states and localities find themselves with both an obligation and an opportunity to right their respective ships. Mississippi has made remarkable improvements in reading scores, while most other states stagnate.
Your job as a policymaker is to uncover the barriers to similar student achievement and address them. Your solutions must be for state or local actors, but your canvas is broad. You can examine staffing, time utilization, discipline, instruction, accountability, curriculum, food insecurity, absenteeism fixes, approaches to reading instruction, teaching roles, classroom disruption, and the like. Your solution must go beyond simply adding funding to existing programs, and if your plan requires political consensus — such as state legislation — you must explain how you will build it. You must limit your proposal to two pages. No policy experience is necessary: this is a journey of the mind, so be creative!
Our second Policy Challenge Super Bowl brought together winning student teams from seven universities — Colorado State University, Grinnell College, University of Kansas, Temple University, University of Chicago, University of Cincinnati, and University of Illinois-Chicago — to present proposals addressing health disparities in their communities. Dr. Susan Monarez, former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, served as the Super Bowl judge.
The IOP challenged students to take on a health care issue within Illinois, Chicago or Cook County and produce a program to address it.
We challenged students to come up with recommendations to the president for making the government more effective and efficient.
The IOP, the University of Kansas, and the University of Cincinnati each challenged their students to act as state lawmakers or as a nongovernmental organization to develop a plan to address a single policy area impacting both rural and urban communities. The winners from each university then presented their proposals at the IOP’s first-ever Policy Challenge Super Bowl.
The period between the November election and the beginning of the new Congress in January is known as a "lame-duck session." Students were tasked with creating a piece of bipartisan legislation that could pass during the lame-duck session after Trump's election but before his inauguration.
While politically divided, rural and urban areas both struggle with health care, child care and food access; an ongoing opioid crisis, and often, economic disinvestment. We challenged students to create policy proposals to address challenges facing both urban and rural communities.
In our fourth university-wide contest, we challenged students to present a plan on how they would improve housing affordability in a city or rural area of their choice.
The Institute of Politics and the Kiphart Center for Global Health and Social Development challenged students to present a plan to attack hunger anywhere around the globe – from conflict zones to your own college campus and anywhere in between – formed through their specific area of study or interest.
The Institute of Politics and the Center for Effective Government joined forces for a university-wide contest soliciting student-generated policy solutions to fix Chicago’s transit system.
The Institute of Politics teamed up with the Harris School of Public Policy for a contest soliciting student-generated policy solutions to the student-debt crisis.
