On December 1, Richard McKenzie, Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of Management at UCI, will give a talk about his compelling research on orphanages and show excerpts from the documentary film, “Homecoming: The Forgotten World of America’s Orphanages.”

McKenzie is executive producer of “Homecoming,” which features aging alumni of four American orphanages poignantly telling how their childhood experiences have impacted their lives. The film was recently shown at the Newport Beach Film Festival to sell-out audiences, and is currently being considered for national distribution.

The film is very close to McKenzie’s heart and his life, having grown up in the 1950s in North Carolina at Barium Springs Home for Children. The experience led him to write the book, The Home: A Memoir of Growing Up in an Orphanage. For the past eight years McKenzie has surveyed more than 2,500 orphan alumni from 14 orphanages and found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, they have outpaced by wide margins their age counterparts in the general population on almost all social and economic measures, including education, income and attitude toward life. McKenzie’s research has led him to conclude that America’s closing of many children’s homes, replacing them with foster care, was misguided. He told a U.S. House subcommittee four years ago, “The nation needs more care options, with an old option – children’s homes – being one of them.”

Prof. Richard McKenzie

McKenzie has written numerous books on economic policy, and his columns and general-interest articles have appeared in almost all of the country’s major national and regional newspapers. He was selected as one of the “Hottest 25 People in Orange County for 2002” for the development of a class which evaluated the rise and fall of the Enron Corporation.