The winner of this year’s Challenge is a team from Northeastern University. Undergrad students Aaron Kanzer (team leader), Vincent Armentano, Alexander Arnst, Ahmed El-Ghazouani, Dylan Kelly, Ben Klepper, Stephen Ngo, Manish Samala, Steven Siano, and Emily Weis worked together to win this year’s competition and showcase the landscape of retirement preparedness among the states in the union. Prof. Nancy Kimelman served as the team’s faculty advisor.

This year, teams were asked to play out a scenario in which they were commissioned by the National Governors Association (NGA) to write a policy advisory paper and prepare a video addressing the preparedness of states for the future retirement challenges of the Millennial generation. The NGA asked them to develop a system for ranking the 50 states, from those most to least prepared to handle the retirement of the Millennial Generation. Millennials will begin retiring as early as 2040. It was up to the teams which indicators to use in developing the ranking system. They were encouraged to be creative and come up with ideas that might challenge status quo thinking. The ranking system was supposed to be based on statistical indicators that can be tracked over time and across states.

Specifically, they were asked to answer:

1. How do states rank in preparing the Millennial generation for retirement in 2040?

2. Where does your state rank compared to other states?

3. What state policy recommendations would you include in your advisory to the NGA to improve the ranking of your state or of states that rank low?

Their questions had to be backed up by solid research and/or model programs. And the video was meant to serve as a PSA promoting the answers among the Millennial Generation.

Click here to read the 2014-2015 winning team’s essay.