Going Global? International Activities by U.S. Schools of Public Policy and Management to Transform Public Affairs Education

Abstract

U.S. schools of public policy and management (PPM) recently have devoted considerable attention to the international content of their degree programs. Most U.S. PPM programs, however, focus on training professionals for domestic employment and very little aggregate information on international outreach activities among these programs has been gathered. This paper applies the results of a new survey about the international activities of U.S. PPM programs to the specific issue of curriculum transformation. The survey findings raise important questions about the strategic orientation of U.S. PPM programs toward globalization. We envision a globalized framework for public policy graduate education and use that framework to identify some elements of a strategy for achieving international outreach and curriculum transformation simultaneously and coherently. We note that the greatest impediment to implementing such a strategy is money, rather than basic institutional capacity, suggesting that a realistic opportunity exists for fundraising in support of international outreach.