Journal of Public Affairs Education

Understanding Excellence in Public Administration, the report of the Task Force on Educating for Excellence in the Master of Public Administration Degree of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), has been received both well and controversially. Practitioners have responded warmly and positively to its serialization in PA Times. Most academics like it, although some have reservations, as they expressed during well-attended panels devoted to the report, which were held during the national conferences of NASPAA in 2008 and ASPA in 2009. Some of the report’s recommended actions, such as those that touch on accreditation, honest advertising, programmatic clarity, and core curricula, have spurred some debate. It is worth noting, therefore, that the Task Force members, though just five in number, are broadly representative of pertinent intellectual currents. The report reveals strands of thinking that are held by constitutionalists and communalists; by technocrats and philosophers; by management scientists and political scientists; by public administrationists and public policy analysts; by those who push the hard-nosed techniques of the New Public Management and those who favor the soft-schnozzed values of the New Public Administration.

This report is a first step. It is up to the professionals and professors, who are ‘public administration,’ to take the next steps.

The authors of the ASPA report, “Understanding Excellence in Public Administration,” have contributed to a dialogue on the future of the MPA degree. They have raised issues about the distinctiveness of the MPA degree in the context of the many degree programs offered by NASPAA schools and programs, the core values of the MPA, the professional goals of MPA programs, and the nature of the positions MPA graduates will fill in the future. In this response, the ASPA report is analyzed on three levels: concerns about the past role of MPA degrees and what their future role could be, a philosophical discussion of the role and mission of the MPA degree, and a call to action for ASPA. Within the range of MPA, public policy, public affairs, and other degree programs, for three years the NASPAA accreditation standards revision process has been shaping action on many of the issues raised in the ASPA report, and has developed a set of standards to meet the needs of the next decade. The NASPAA Standards 2009 process looks forward by indicating that the distinctiveness of programs in public affairs, public administration, and public policy lie in their missions, governance, and curriculum. The process demonstrably emphasizes public values; reaffirms missionbased accreditation to ensure a wide range of approaches to preparing students for professional public service; defines competencies that students in the field should master, given changes in the public sector environment; and requires programs to measure the achievement of these competencies.

Every profession rests upon a particular body of text, thought, and practice. This corpus is taught, in all esteemed professions, by way of a signature pedagogy. Many conclude that, because the practitioners and academics of our profession must bridge theory and practice, and because the singular characteristic of our profession is that people make decisions and act under conditions of greater uncertainty than those enjoyed by other professions, Public Administration does not admit to such a pedagogy. This paper argues that these difficulties are opportunities, rather than obstacles, toward devising such a pedagogy, and that our students can learn how to (1) thrive on chaos, (2) make rapid decisions based on incomplete and biased information, (3) resolve novel situations even as apprehensive parties clamor to secure their interests, (4) collaborate with a team of fellow bureaucrats as they identify, share, and (5) master a situation that is filtered through a fog of quasi-accurate information. Students also can learn how to navigate the situation by identifying patterns for problem-solving, and employing sophisticated representations to develop and communicate their ideas, while grappling with important political, environmental, and social interests — by way of a pedagogy that is at once immersive and uncertain, yet directive and retentive. Suggestions are made about how to manage such a pedagogy, based on the research of behaviorists, cognitivists, and affectivists.

The growing capabilities of distance-education technologies, combined with potential cost and efficiency benefits, and the possibility to extend opportunities for higher education to wider, sometimes-isolated audiences, is creating a predictable move to offer increasing numbers of graduate public administration courses and even complete degrees, through various technological means. While these trends offer new and exciting opportunities to (1) reach students who in earlier times would not be able to engage in graduate education, and (2) further extend the professionalism of public administrators, there are philosophical and empirical reasons to consider the possible limits of technology-based, distanceeducation practices. This article argues that contemporary governance requires administrators with competence in social and group processes that are best when developed in a live format.

Almost half of all undergraduate students in the United States are enrolled in community colleges, and it was once expected that the nation’s community colleges would move aggressively to provide introductory-level education in public affairs/administration. Our research, however, reveals that less than two percent of America’s community colleges offer associate’s degree programs in public affairs/administration. A telephone survey of the programs that exist revealed substantial curriculum content overlap that could present articulation problems for students who move on to four-year degrees and graduate work in our profession. Community colleges play major roles in educating some categories of public servants, especially those in the public safety and health areas, but the need for “mass” education in public affairs/administration, which is oriented to training first-level supervisors in the basics of public service and management skills, is not being met by community colleges.

The purpose of this study is to ascertain the degree to which marketing was integrated into the curricula of U. S. nonprofit management programs. Seventyfour program directors of U. S. nonprofit management programs responded to a national survey. They answered questions pertaining to the academic location of the program, their own academic fields, the number of marketing and marketingrelated courses in their programs, their perceptions of what topics are considered part of marketing, and the relative importance they assigned to marketing in relation to other topics. Major points are the following: (1) Program directors are primarily from the public administration field (26 percent); (2) the nonprofit management programs had, on average, about one course dedicated to nonprofit marketing, and two marketing-related courses such as fund-raising or public relations; (3) program directors ranked marketing as sixth among 13 core subjects, indicating that a moderate importance is assigned to marketing in the curricula; (4) findings indicate that nonprofit management programs might benefit by recruiting nonprofit marketing professors to teach these courses and participate in curriculum development.

Following the dramatic economic reform and development of the past 30 years, China is experiencing increasingly complicated political and social problems that call for the government to enhance its administrative capacity and working efficiency. Different levels of the Chinese government, ranging from national to local, have sent teams of public officials to developed countries for training, in order to build a modern and professional civil servant team. This paper demonstrates how to build and maintain a successful overseas training program by analyzing a case study of a group of 10 Chinese municipal officials who were trained for six months in their United States sister city. The case study finds that several important elements, such as strong academic support, a professional government internship, and active community involvement are crucial for the success of this type of training program.

Consultants on economic impact projects face a challenge in terms of measuring the estimated benefits of such projects, particularly when they are promoted within a heightened, politicized context, as is often the case with the sports facilities. Supporters and opponents of such projects hire consultants (public and private) to measure the value of the investment, which is frequently couched as an economic impact assessment. This often leads to conflicting conclusions, with significant divergences in the measured value of the project. We use a comparative case study to highlight how this happens, and to illustrate for public policy and administration scholars how the lessons for conducting such analyses are lost on policy students, and also are reflected as bad or useless knowledge in the communities they serve.

A policy course requires a set of evaluation tools to explore the effects of proposed and existing policy initiatives. This paper offers an economic approach for teaching health policy to students who are not economics majors. The author provides a model that uses a graduate-level elective course as an example. In this course, an economics “boot camp” is used to provide a short, intensive overview of principles of economics. Next, two comprehensive health economics applications are used for a transition from economics principles to health policy analysis. In the balance of the course, economic concepts are integrated into evaluations of four health policy goal areas: access, cost, quality, and market interventions. A discussion of the methods for applying this design to other graduate and undergraduate policy courses for non-economics majors is also included.

This paper outlines ways to structure a research-methods class so that students gain a practical knowledge of how research is done. Emphasis is placed on data collection, using statistical software, and writing up results. Included in this article are several assignments and exercises that, when combined, work to produce a scholarly empirical report. Students gain an appreciation of the fruits and frustrations involved in the research process, and learn to be more critical consumers of research projects.