Los Angeles Policy Symposium

Keynote Speaker Robert Ross at 2015 Symposium

Keynote Speaker Robert Ross at 2015 L.A. Policy Symposium

Photo by Diane Baldwin/RAND

The L.A. Policy Symposium, cohosted by Pardee RAND, UCLA, USC, Pepperdine, and Claremont Graduate University for 10 years from 2006 to 2015, was the premier annual policy research meeting in Southern California. The Symposium was a unique forum for researchers, faculty and graduate policy students from the five leading policy schools in Los Angeles County to address the major policy challenges facing Los Angeles, California and the United States.

The Symposium served as a venue for leading policy practitioners to interact with the foremost policy researchers in their field, with keynote speeches and panel discussions ranging across health, security, crime and drugs, education, Social Security and Medicare, immigration, transportation and infrastructure, climate change, and fiscal/budgetary challenges at the local, state, and national levels.

In addition, the Symposium provided an opportunity for the next generation of policy analysts to showcase their work and receive feedback from their peers in a series of student presentations. This embodied the core mission of the Symposium: bringing together the best minds in the region to address the toughest policy problems through debate and collaboration.