In keeping with California’s claim to be the Homelessness Services Capital of America, UC Berkeley is now offering students the ability to major in a growth field sure to offer ample employment opportunities: Homelessness Studies.
“We are blessed with having a living laboratory of homelessness right here on our campus doorstep,” explained Dr. Claudine Fentanyl-Winnebago, Associate Dean of Science Research Grant Overhead Consumption. “For too long, universities treated homelessness as a problem to be eliminated. We prefer to think of it as an industry to be grown, with our graduates in the vanguard.”
Dr. Fentanyl-Winnebago noted that California has already spent $24 billion on homelessness since 2019, and the homeless population has grown by 30,000 in gratitude, proof of a robust and expanding market the university would be irresponsible not to staff. “Every unhoused Californian represents a resume line for one of our graduates,” she beamed.
The centerpiece of the new curriculum is HOMESTUD 301: Advanced Encampment Immersion, a mandatory practicum requiring students to live on the street for one full semester, subsisting on dumpster fare and defecating discreetly in approved shrubbery, while journaling their “lived experience” for peer review. Extra credit is awarded to whichever student generates the highest gross revenue through panhandling and shoplifting.
Graduates will be fast-tracked into Sacramento internships, nonprofit executive suites, and eventually the State Assembly, where the real money is made keeping the perpetual crisis funded. “We’re not training students to end homelessness,” Dr. Fentanyl-Winnebago clarified. “We’re training the next generation of leaders to protect California’s fastest-growing industry.”
The American Association of University Professors hailed the new major as a landmark for academic freedom, vowing to make Homelessness Studies a required offering at every university in the country. “Every campus deserves such a living laboratory,” said an AAUP spokesperson. “And since much of the nation’s adjunct faculty already lives in their cars we can hit the ground running.”