Two educators who have studied and written about the way economic disadvantages affect children and adults will receive honorary doctorates from Penn State on May 17.

Jonathan Kozol and Glen H. Elder Jr. are among a dozen speakers scheduled to address University Park graduates that weekend, as the university confers more than 6,700 degrees at spring commencement ceremonies.

Statewide, Penn State will be graduating about 9,500 students, including more than 7,000 baccalaureate degrees.

A Harvard-educated public school teacher, Kozol is the author of several seminal books on the plight of children in low-income urban schools and neighborhoods, including Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace.

Many of his non-fiction books mix research data and media reports with personal accounts of children, families and teachers he met in travels around Roxbury, Mass., the South Bronx in New York, and East St. Louis, Mo.

Kozol visited to University Park in late 2001. During a speech, he told an audience in Schwab Auditorium: "Standardized tests without equity and without the supporting resources to make them effective tools of change are clubs with which we knock down our children and bludgeon our teachers."

Elder -- a 1957 Penn State graduate and current professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina -- examined the lives of young people growing up during the Great Depression and analyzed how the economic crisis affected them later.

His work helped to spawn the "life course theory," which argues that social changes influence people living during a particular time period and also affect how they survive during the rest of their lives, Bill Hessert, spokesman for the College of Health and Human Development (HHD), said.

Elder will address HHD graduates at 9 a.m. in the Bryce Jordan Center.

At noon in the BJC, Kozol will speak to graduates of the College of the Liberal Arts.

Faculty, staff and students suggest potential honorary degree recipients, university spokeswoman Allison Kessler said.

Then, a 15-member search committee decides on a few candidates to submit to Penn State President Graham Spanier for approval, she added.