Our Philanthropy Advisory Fellowship at Harvard University Effective Altruism Student Group has just published an EA course syllabus that we developed: http://www.harvardea.org/blog/changemakers
We hope this can be a helpful resource for EA groups at other schools to encourage faculty to create new courses on EA.
Hmm... I think that providing sweatshop jobs has positive economic and social long-term consequences, because it brings people out of extreme poverty. I think the main drawback is the non-utilitarian criticism of sweatshops as "exploiting" people. Most people do not recognize that sweatshops are orders of magnitude safer than living in extreme poverty where something like 20% of your children die. But even if people were aware of that, they could still say that since sweatshops do not have the same safety standards is the developed country factories, it is somehow unfair to those workers - they are not getting justice.
The problem with this kind of reasoning is that in the same way one could attempt to justify slavery: just because sweatshops/slavery provide living conditions better than none, it doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to abolish them. Hence, by boycotting sweatshops one gives an important message to corporations that use them. As a result, under sufficient pressure, companies will change their rules and take care to provide better working conditions. The goal here is long-term structural improvement of social/economic practices rather than short-term help.