The evolution of organizational forms for public service education

ABSTRACT

This article investigates transformations in public service education over the past 50 years, specifically: How have organizational forms evolved, and what lessons can we draw from that evolution? The organizational form construct originates in population ecology theory. We draw from a variety of evidentiary sources in answering the research questions, specifically extant literature, quantitative analysis of longitudinal data about organizational forms, and interviews with public service education opinion leaders. Among the findings are that formal structures, program activities and delivery, and the norms that underpin public service education have changed significantly over time. Organization environments influence organizational forms in public service education. Stand-alone university units, typically colleges and schools, offering a comprehensive portfolio of teaching, research, and service are increasing and have become a preferred form for public service education. Educational leaders in US universities should note emerging organizational forms as they seek to adapt to changing environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Organizational form
• public administration education
• public affairs education
• public policy education
• public service education

Acknowledgments

We thank Fran Berry, Henry Brady, Don Kettl, Jack Knott, Sara Mogulescu, Kathy Newcomer, Jeff Raffel, Daniel Rich, Curtis Ventriss, and Susan Webb Yackee for their comments on a draft of this article. We also thank Stacy Drudy and Laurel McFarland from the Network of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) for sharing data from the Annual Data Reports and Accreditation Rosters. The authors are solely responsible for the views expressed in this article. We are grateful to the Volcker Alliance for funding the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. Terms used to describe public service education are quite varied. For instance, the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA) uses “public policy,” “public affairs,” and “public administration” in its name. Raffel (2010; 2019, pp. 98–99), chair of the 2009 NASPAA standards revision process and subsequently president of NASPAA, describes the difficulty of getting agreement on an umbrella designation for the field. Rather than using any of the three common designations, which are not exhaustive, we usually use “public service education” to refer to the whole range of education programs that prepare people for public service. Public service education is not just related to government service but to the entire public sector. It also embraces education for the nonprofit sector and public-private partnerships.

2. Although public service education has grown since the 1920s, it is a relatively small share of US higher education. For example, law schools admit a total of about 110,000 students per year and graduate about 35,000. Business schools attract about 300,000 students annually, and public service education between 20,000 and 30,000.

3. As evidence of slow growth, Grode and Holzer (1975) note that the number of MPA programs increased from 2 in 1931 to 13 in 1952.

4. For intellectual histories of the field, see, Kettl (1993) and Farrell et al. (2021).

5. A noteworthy addition to the organizational population for public service education was the founding of the Littauer Graduate School of Public Administration at Harvard in 1936. Littauer became the Harvard Kennedy School in 1966.

6. This second wave coincides with the entry of the Ford Foundation, which initiated start-up grants for US universities to establish programs designed to address problems of urban America. The University of Delaware’s Biden School, for example, grew out of a program funded by the foundation in 1961. Another Ford Foundation initiative was support for eight universities (Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Harvard, Michigan, University of Texas at Austin, Stanford, and RAND Graduate School) to create public policy schools in the mid-1960s. See, Rich and Warren (1980), Stokes (1996), and Ellwood (2008) for more about involvement of the Ford Foundation.

7. Ellwood (2008) acknowledged three additional categories of graduate public service education programs. They include (1) programs part of a field of public endeavor such as public health or planning, (2) schools of public affairs, and (3) continuing education programs. Ellwood excluded programs in (1) and (3) and merged the public affairs schools into the public policy category.

8. Ellwood refers to public service programs in generic schools as being located in business schools, but most of them were in schools of administration or management (e.g., graduate schools of administration at the University of California, Davis, Irvine, and Riverside, Willamette University Atkinson Graduate School of Management, Yale University School of Management) rather than business schools.

9. Some mergers and related strategies have been documented that begin to answer how organizational forms have changed in response to fiscal pressures. Denhardt et al. (1997), for instance, discuss how the University of Delaware managed its funding of graduate students.

10. Although the designation “comprehensive school” has been used by NASPAA for many years, we discovered it had no formal or consistent definition among NASPAA members. We therefore avoided using it as a label for formal structures (see online Supplement: Appendices).

11. Program units are categorized by the inclusion of phrases in unit names. Program names with multiple combined fields including public service (i.e., “school of political science and public administration”) are sorted as public service programs. The category for “Other” includes units such as “College of Arts and Sciences,” or “School of Professional Studies.” Table 1 includes the breakdown for the three most prominent formal structures.

12. Denhardt et al. (1977) describe an early systematic effort to join theory and practice, which they call the Delaware model. It is based on their experiences beginning in the 1960s in the University of Delaware’s College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, now the Joseph R. Biden School of Public Policy and Administration.

13. Evidence of the current disciplinary composition of faculty in public service education appears in Light and Ding (2021, pp. 31–32). The sample for their report used the top 77 public affairs schools ranked by U.S. News & World Report in 2019. The average percentage across all types of schools is about 20%.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Volcker Alliance.

Notes on contributors

James L. Perry

James L. Perry is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington. Perry is former editor-in-chief of Journal of Public Affairs Education and Public Administration Review. He recently edited Public Service and Good Governance for the Twenty-first Century (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and authored Managing Organizations to Sustain Passion for Public Service (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Emily Derringer Mee

Emily Derringer Mee is a second-year Ph.D. in Public Affairs student at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington. Mee is completing her degree with a major in public management and a minor in policy analysis. Her research interests include public administration and management concerns in higher education, especially as they relate to equity and representation.