About

The Notre Dame Leadership Seminars are a competitive, fully funded 10-day residential program for academically talented rising seniors, running July 18–29, 2026. Students select one of six seminar tracks, each taught by Notre Dame faculty and culminating in one transferable college credit. Approximately 150 students are admitted across all tracks each year. Inequality in America examines the structural and historical roots of social and economic inequality in the United States, with particular attention to education, political representation, residential segregation, and racial disparities. The seminar is co-taught by Ricardo Ramirez, Associate Professor of Political Science and director of the Hesburgh Program in Public Service, and Amy Langenkamp, Associate Professor of Sociology and interim director of Notre Dame's Center for Research on Educational Inequality — two faculty whose primary research specializations are directly embedded in the seminar's subject matter.

The course is organized in two halves. The first develops students' analytical frameworks for understanding how inequality is produced and reproduced across institutions — interrogating patterns of wealth concentration, the persistence of poverty, and the intersectional effects of race, class, gender, and immigrant status. The second pivots to policy: students research potential countermeasures, drawing on interdisciplinary sources to evaluate what mechanisms exist for reducing structural inequality. The pedagogy is seminar-based and discussion-driven, consistent with the Leadership Seminars format across all tracks.

Notre Dame's Leadership Seminars are designed to attract students from diverse public and private high schools, geographic regions, socioeconomic backgrounds, and ideological perspectives. For students seriously interested in sociology, political science, public policy, or social justice — and prepared to engage empirical and normative arguments about inequality at a demanding level — this seminar offers full funding, expert instruction from active researchers, and a residential intellectual community at one of the country's leading research universities.