Do undergraduate public administration, policy, and affairs programs mimic graduate curricula?

ABSTRACT

Curricular mimicking between undergraduate and graduate public administration, policy, and affairs degrees is an ongoing concern of program administrators. Mimicking occurs when the curricular elements of an undergraduate degree overlap those of a graduate degree. Missing from the discourse surrounding this issue is empirical evidence of curricular mimicking. We contribute to the ongoing discourse by providing evidence from a random sample of 42 universities. We find evidence of mimicking both between and within schools, but the mimicking is not complete. Although comparisons indicate mimicking exists, there is also evidence of substantial variation in curriculum coverage and emphasis. We recommend NASPAA take a leadership role in defining a continuum of learning for public administration, policy, and affairs degrees that covers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral curricula.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum
• curriculum mimicking
• graduate education
• undergraduate education

Notes

1. I use first-person plural pronouns throughout this article in recognition of the assistance provided by my research assistant, Ms. Athena Edwards.

2. Collection of data from school websites occurred between September 2016 and July 2017.

3. We excluded executive graduate programs and non-PAPA undergraduate degrees with emphases or concentrations in public administration from the population of degrees under study.

4. Several schools did not designate core courses but instead listed a set of required courses. For the purposes of this study, we treated required courses as core courses. Washington State University did not list core or required courses for its Bachelor of Arts in public affairs degree. For this program, we classified courses with the prefixes POLS and SOC as core courses, with the exception of POLS 101, which was part of the university core. In addition, we did not include the Integrative Capstone as part of the major because the university listed it as part of the university core.

5. For the following schools, course catalogs were used for academic years other than 2016–2017: Clark Atlanta University (2014–2016), Rutgers University—Camden (2013–2015), Grambling State University (2015–2017), University of Texas—San Antonio (2015–2017), and University of Texas—Austin (2015–2017). The catalogs for Clark Atlanta University and Rutgers University—Camden were the most recent catalogs available online at the time of data collection.

6. There were three exceptions to this process. North Carolina State University listed 18 core credit hours for the MPA program in its catalog but 21 core credit hours on the program website. Only the website listed the core courses. Since the course removed from the catalog credit hour calculation was unknown, we used the website to determine the number of credit hours in the core. The core courses listed in the Rutgers University—Camden catalog did not match the website. Because the website provided information that is more recent (the catalog was for the 2013–2015 academic years), we considered the courses and descriptions on the website to be accurate. For the University of South Carolina, we used the MPA handbook to identify core courses and their descriptions, because the graduate bulletin did not identify core courses.

7. The MPA at Columbia University and the Bachelor of Science in public affairs degree at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis had concentrations with different credit requirements, resulting in varying total credit hours to earn the degrees.

8. Ohio State University offers both a Bachelor of Arts in public management, leadership and policy and a Bachelor of Science in public policy analysis resulting in 16 degrees at 15 schools.

9. We exclude the “Other” category from this part of the analysis because its inclusion would overstate the average difference in emphasis since the category is a catchall.

10. By “coverage of curricular content,” we mean one degree in the pair required at least one course in the category, but the other required none.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

D. Ryan Miller

D. Ryan Miller is an assistant professor of Public Administration in the Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern University. He teaches statistics and the management of information and technology in the public sector. He has served on NASPAA’s Local Government Management Education committee since 2016.