MPA/MPP Specializations

The following are some of the specializations offered in MPA/MPP programs:

Public and Nonprofit Management
This concentration enables students to develop managerial skills and introduces them to analytical tools necessary in organizational decision-making. Coursework covers the basics of nonprofit management, from budgeting and human-resource management, to strategy and organizational behavior.

Finance and Fiscal Policy
This concentration equips students with skills and knowledge to grapple with fiscal issues that affect leaders and managers in national, state and local governments. Students learn financial accounting, public finance, expenditure forecasting and expenditure limitations, cost-benefit analysis and trends in fiscal conditions. Students specialized in finance and fiscal policy generally seek positions in national, state or local financial institutions.

Environmental Policy and Management
This concentration enables students to analyze and understand domestic and/or international environmental policy. Students explore the ecological and political origins of current environmental policy issues and learn how to propose resolutions via organizational analysis, budgeting, financial analysis and reporting, political analysis, statistical analysis and microeconomics.

Health Policy
This concentration provides future leaders and managers with tools both to synthesize current health policy knowledge in new ways, to formulate innovative solutions to achieve improvement in the quality of health care and to create the requisite interdisciplinary approach that will improve the understanding of global, national and local health issues.

Education Policy
This specialization allows students to gain a deeper understanding of policy and management issues in three main contexts: primary and secondary education, higher education, and international education and to propose policy solutions applying their analytical and qualitative and quantitative research skills.

Global Public Policy
This MPP concentration gives students the skills and knowledge that would enable them to see beyond national boundaries, to think globally and act locally, nationally and internationally. Within this concentration students can focus on international development, global trade and finance, global environmental policy, human rights and democratization, security, humanitarian intervention and governance.

Social Policy
This concentration provides students with quantitative and qualitative analysis skills that will enable them to formulate and evaluate social policies, taking into consideration budgetary constraints, stakeholder interests and ethical dilemmas. Social policies usually address such critical issues as poverty, inequality, education, crime, family wellbeing, social inclusion, social mobility and sustainable livelihoods.

Science and Technology Policy
This concentration trains future managers to evaluate the effect of new technologies on policy decisions. Students interested in this concentration, for example, may examine the role of the Internet in public schools, analyze how organizations enact information technologies, consider how giant steps in military technology have altered modern warfare, or weigh whether or not telecommunications regulation have kept up with innovations in that sector.

Government, Politics and Policy Studies
This concentration provides students with skills and knowledge to evaluate actionable research and information to address political and social issues. Students who choose this concentration generally become policy analysts who advise government officials and executives on policy issues and political strategy.

International/Comparative Policy
This specialization prepares students to take a comparative approach to public policy, including both comparative analyses of policy development and implementation, and analyses focused on international relations and foreign policy. This specialization allows students to explore international and domestic institutions, political development and culture, political economy and policymaking, law, and social and political change.

International Development Studies
Students interested in this concentration are concerned with governance and policy issues in developing countries. Students in the international development concentration explore a broad range of disciplinary perspectives such as anthropology, economics, organization theory, regional planning, information technologies and legal studies

Human Rights and Social Justice
Students in the human rights and social justice concentration focus on human rights, which remain controversial in world politics. What are the political and economic constraints that stand in the way of the full realization of human rights? This concentration explores the relationship between politics and human rights with a social sciences approach.

Sources:
Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, Cornell University; Center for Public Policy and Administration, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Duke University.