2023-2024 Live Pitch Session Program

The Problem: The Chicago Pension Crisis

The City of Chicago has $35 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. Leaders from across the ideological spectrum have called that liability a major threat to the city's long-term viability.  At the Harris School we believe a problem of this scale and complexity requires innovative thinking from one of the City's most important stakeholders - its future leaders and taxpayers.

Meanwhile, in the recent mayoral election, Chicagoans made clear that they want new spending on infrastructure, neighborhood reinvestment, community policing, and many other city services. One does not have to be an accountant to recognize that this is not sustainable.  

Chicago’s leaders have debated solutions to this pension funding problem for years, but it is clear that new ideas and new approaches are needed. 

At the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, we pride ourselves on training a new generation of confident, rigorous, and dedicated policymakers committed to confronting our world’s most pressing issues.

The Harris Policy Innovation Challenge is a policy competition, allowing students to apply their insights, skill set, and creativity toward solving the most important real-world challenges facing municipalities, states, and the nation.  

The inaugural competition spanned the autumn, winter, and spring quarters of the 2023-2024 academic year and urged students to focus on designing practical, feasible, and effective proposals to make progress on a critically important policy challenge close to home, the Chicago pension crisis.

Under the direction of Harris faculty member, Prof. Justin Marlowe,  students attended seminars taught by subject-matter experts from academia and industry, and worked with professional mentors throughout the year. 

Tonight, we will see the three finalist teams present their proposed solutions to the Chicago pension crisis, live, Shark Tank-style before a panel of expert judges. The team with the solution the judges deem most novel, efficacious, and politically feasible will win $10,000.