by Susan Carroll Schwab

Susan Carroll Schwab is the former Dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs. She also recently stepped down as President of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs and has been nominated by President Bush to be Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of the Treasury.

What do National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe, have in common? They all hold graduate degrees from professional schools of public policy and international affairs.

There are roughly 60 such graduate programs in the United States today. Some public policy and international affairs curricula are offered under the same institutional roof; at some universities the international affairs program is housed separately. Together, these programs handed out an estimated 3,000 professional masters degrees in 2002. Many also have small Ph.D. programs. Yet even as their enrollments have grown in the post-September 11th reaffirmation of patriotism and public service, the numbers are dwarfed by business schools and law schools—their principal competitors for talent.

What sets these programs apart is their commitment to a multidisciplinary approach to understanding and solving the world’s problems—whether at the community level or on a global scale. While their graduates all share a commitment to public service, their education is sufficiently flexible that once in the workforce, they are often in the vanguard of their professions and engaged in careers that entail moving, working and thinking across sectors. A snapshot of public policy and international affairs school alumni would take you well beyond the government executives noted above to include individuals in almost every government agency; they are on the air at ABC and Fox News; managing multilateral banks and multinational corporations; they hold prominent positions in governments around the world; and they are serving humanitarian assistance roles in countless nonprofit/nongovernmental organizations.

Low Profile; High Impact.
So why are only a few such programs visible, and why do the magazines that rank graduate programs consider them only important enough to rank once every three years or not at all? It is a sad irony that the very strengths and competencies of these programs are also the principal source of their weaknesses.

What are these strengths? Integrated curricula that demand multidisciplinary approaches, that merge theory and practice, and that value process, context and peripheral vision. Versatile degrees, conducive to lifelong learning, with recipients who can move across all sectors of the economy. And first-class faculty who do not wish to be placed into the neat categories of traditional academic disciplines. Were all research emanating from these schools to focus on the same handful of refereed journals; were all graduates to move in lockstep into management training or professional development programs in a given sector; and were all of these graduate programs to offer the same named degree, their profile as a group would no doubt be higher. They would also have far less impact, for it is the absence of neat categories that make public policy and international affairs programs so successful and so unique in higher education.

Vive la Difference
Programs at schools of public policy and international affairs are designed to enable their graduates and faculty to have impact; to make a difference. They are a community where scholar-practitioners are embraced. They offer an environment where the right Op-Ed. piece or article in a widely read magazine or journal is applauded as much as others in the academy might value an article in the most prominent peer-reviewed journal. This is not
to denigrate important scholarly research—the faculty produce it, as well—rather, it reflects the value placed on impact; on reaching a wider audience. These are professional schools that have succeeded in bridging the divide between research and the delivery of competent professionals that has plagued other genres of professional schools for years.

Curriculum. What sets these programs apart is their attention to nurturing a truly integrative, multidisciplinary curriculum. All graduates at the master’s level of a top public policy and/or international affairs school have studied a core set of policy analysis tools. These include microeconomics, macroeconomics, quantitative methods/ statistics, and political theory and processes. The emphasis is on problem solving, on the rigorous application of this multidisciplinary toolkit to the issues of the world. On top of this versatile base, most programs add courses in management and leadership and finance; virtually all include a heavy dose of ethics; some, an entire course in the moral and ethical dimensions of public policy.

Beyond the core curriculum, students apply the analytic tools they’ve been equipped with by specializing in one of an almost unlimited number of policy areas: education, welfare, children and family policy, the environment, international development, national security studies, health care policy, housing and urban development, criminal justice, and so on. This approach to a public policy/international affairs education can be thought of as the “undiscipline” in social science. It embraces knowledge for the sake of action, placing as much value on the application of theory as on the theory itself.

These programs also emphasize communications skills: if you cannot persuade the policymaker, your analytic prowess has little impact. Similarly, these programs emphasize implementation: once you have convinced the policymaker or funder that your approach is the right one, unless you can successfully launch, manage and evaluate your idea, even the best policy initiative is at risk.

Above all, these programs recognize the importance of context—specifically, the contextual setting in political, economic, international and human terms of a problem and its potential solutions. This in itself is a distinctive competency of the graduates.

Faculty. The composition of faculty in public policy and international affairs programs is unique. Although generally dominated by economists and political scientists, most schools offering these programs boast faculty from a wide range of disciplines. In any given school it is not unusual to find lawyers, sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, physicists, MBAs or MDs. Most initially emerged from the traditional disciplines, and many still have strong affiliations and stellar reputations in those disciplines—but more often than not, these faculty have chosen to move away from the narrow specialization of their original fields.

Another characteristic of these faculties is their embrace of scholar-practitioners, individuals with strong scholarly credentials who have demonstrated strengths as practitioners and who periodically move into government. Distinguished practitioners are also often welcome in these programs as adjunct professors or professors of the practice. In both cases, one finds a revolving door between the academy and the likes of the Council of Economic Advisors, the departments of Defense, State, Treasury, Health and Human Services and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that can only serve to strengthen both the teaching and the practice of public policy.

Graduates. The students in these programs want to make a difference in the world (whether the corner of the world they choose is a neighborhood or a continent) and they would like to make a decent living doing so. They tend to enroll in schools of public policy or international affairs not because of the unique characteristics articulated in this article, but because they have decided not to go to business school or to practice law. Some students have their entire careers ahead of them; some are well along in careers they want to advance or change; some are full-time students, some work and attend school on a part- time basis.

All of these students recognize that there is no standard path to the unlimited array of career options that exist. And while they may bridle initially at the core courses that stand between them and classes on saving the ecosystem or eliminating welfare as we know it, they emerge from these programs able to paint on an enormous professional canvas, and motivated by the potential for impact and influence, regardless of sector.

Issues and Challenges Ahead
These programs are not without challenges, and yet the nature of their faculties and the diversity of thought they promote in their students should serve them well in the evolution of their own programs. Employment opportunities for graduates are generally not an issue.1 Critical mass, “brand image,” faculty recognition and the temptation to cut corners may be.

What these programs suffer from most is their lack of brand name or product identity. One survey by the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA), found that less than twenty member schools together accounted for forty-three different degrees and degree acronyms, ranging from the Master of International Affairs (MIA) to the Master of Public Policy (MPP) or Master of Public Administration (MPA) with an international track to more specialized degrees in area studies. Public policy programs face a slightly less daunting range of degree names, but the problem remains the same: these disparate degree names work against efforts to create a critical mass of graduates that employers perceive and can count on to share common competencies.

Further complications include the fact that some universities have more than one such program on campus, and a trend among longstanding public administration programs to offer the increasingly popular public policy tracks without necessarily requiring a full load of policy analysis courses to back them up. But there does appear to be a gradual merging of the once-distinct public administration, public policy and international affairs fields. This trend seems to have been influenced not only by a growing understanding that such integration is a better reflection of the world but also because the programs are flexible enough to change.

Another challenge stems from the difficulties public policy programs sometimes face in obtaining tenure for their faculties from university promotion and tenure committees dominated by arts and sciences disciplines. Top peer-reviewed disciplinary journals like the American Economic Review or the American Political Science Review are known and valued in these circles, while many publications favored by policy experts— such as a range of issue-specific journals or higher impact (but not technically peer-reviewed) publications like Foreign Affairs or Brookings volumes—are not. Perhaps as a result, policy-relevant research by policy and international affairs school faculty must often wait until they have gained tenure through more traditional publications; indeed, at least one leading school is quite explicit to junior faculty on this matter.

Other challenges include tight academic budgets and the tension between comprehensive, quality education and students’ demands to move through graduate professional programs as rapidly as possible. Together these influences are likely to push schools in the direction of shorter programs, larger classes and vertical integration into the undergraduate realm2. Added numbers of graduates are sure to contribute to achieving critical mass, but reducing the credit hours and courses required for graduate degrees risks further exacerbating the challenge of consistency and branding.

Where will tomorrow’s top leaders, policymakers, analysts and organizers come from? Evidence from recent surveys of young people about public affairs, and the dramatic upswing in applications since September 11th, would suggest they are likely to come from professional schools of public policy and international affairs. And whether in the public, private or nonprofit sectors, they are certain to offer the nation a distinctive form of public service.

1 The Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA), for example, reports that in 2002, 42 percent of its graduates went into the public sector, 25 percent into private business, 23 percent into nonprofits and NGOs, with 10 percent opting for further study. Overall placement rates approaching 90 percent six months after graduation are comparable to those of business and law schools.

2 A few public policy/international affairs programs already offer undergraduate degrees, which turn out to be among the most popular degrees at the university.

Sources: The Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA; apsia.org), the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM; appam.org) and the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA; naspaa.org).

Copyright information | Masthead | Carnegie Corporation of New York web site