Course Reviews: Master of Public Policy at the Hertie School of Governance

When I started my graduate degree most people would hear ‘Master of Public Policy‘, nod, pause a couple of a seconds and then ask me what that was, exactly. At first I didn’t know how to answer. Judging from the answers given by my graduating class (and myself) we’re still not entirely sure.

Now, at least, when people ask me about the course I did I have a quickfire response: it’s like an MBA but for politics.

Need someone to revamp a bit of your company? Hire an MBA grad. Want somebody to draft you a new policy or run a project that isn’t profit oriented? Hire an MPP grad.

The world of modern government is difficult. The public sector is responsible for far more than it ever used to be, people expect much more from and the general public is generally more dissatisfied with it than ever. Public policy schools have sprung up to try to train people who can solve some of these problems.

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Isaiah Berlin

Personally, my motivation for doing an MPP came from my various internships in development and hearing the experiences of friends and bloggers who were doing similar things. I saw that, often, many organisations in the sector aren’t run very well. They aren’t financially stable, the people in charge are often technical experts rather than people who know how to run organisations, and, as a result, most organisations are struggling to stay relevant, transparent and respected during a difficult moment in history. Rather than become a highly specialised lawyer or logistics expert, I figured, why not go study to be a generalist – be the person who lets specialists focus on their specialisations.

The MPP programme dips into economics, law, politics, public administration and statistics; enough to give graduates an understanding of the broader set of challenges facing public and nonprofit organisations today. This is a degree that sees the fox as superior to the hedgehog, an approach that I think global development truly benefits from. If you want to come out of your graduate school experience an expert in your field, this probably isn’t the course for you.

Of course, you do learn skills. In the (brutal) first semester everybody gets a crash course in economics (both micro and macro in 12 weeks!) and statistics, where you learn to use STATA and understand multiple regressions. I did courses on digital economics, learned how to download and analyse social media data, got an introduction to law and participated in a series of mock negotiations during my two years in Berlin.

The MPP is a professional graduate degree that focuses on shorter, more workplace applicable outputs: memos, short essays, presentation after dreaded presentation. It is a tough and full time course that gets through a lot of material very quickly. The day I handed in my thesis I had an oral exam. After that, I went right home to work on two essays due that same week. Many of my peers would agree that this course was a lot more work and hours (say goodbye to your weekends) than most jobs. But once you get through it, nothing else is likely to phase you.

The Berlin experience

I chose to go to the Hertie School in Berlin for three main reasons: it was cheaper than most of the other options (both in terms of tuition and living costs); I really liked the city from previous visits; and my partner grew up in Berlin. I’m still very pleased with my decision.

There are things you probably already know. Berlin is cheap as chips. Berlin is still just about the coolest city on the planet right now. But it is also the capital of Europe’s most powerful country and the Hertie School is located a couple of minutes from the Reichstag, slap bang in the middle of the government district. Practically every day at Hertie a important minister, ambassador, policy maker or social scientist visits to give a talk (with free food and drinks afterwards). You can’t help but feel you’re at the centre of a major political capital. In addition, Hertie is tiny compared to most of its competitors – my graduating class, the only class of my cohort, was just 146 people. That’s it. You’ll know most of your peers and most of the professors will know your name and learn your interests. You don’t feel part of a huge machine at Hertie, but part of a very active, very well connected political community.

There are downsides. Hertie is a very young institution, just over a decade old, and doesn’t have the name recognition (at least outside Germany) of the LSE or Columbia University. Particularly for non-Europeans, battling with the bureaucratic German registration process and finding housing can be gruelling. While my fellow students were largely very well integrated there is no denying that the Germans tended to stick with their fellow Germans, leaving the rest of us ausländer to club together.

On the whole, however, the downsides were handily outweighed. What Hertie doesn’t have in brand recognition it makes up for in faculty and staff who are massively committed and energetic – it’s a young, small, hungry institution that doesn’t coast along on its name. One of the worst aspects of my undergraduate experience was the feeling that I wasn’t seen as a student with interests and potential, but a source of income. This will not happen at Hertie.

The MPP network

I heard about the MPP via the Master of Public Administration course offered at the London School of Economics (which is, broadly, the same as the MPP offered at Hertie). There are several Public Policy schools who band together around the world offering more or less comparable degrees and a huge amount of study abroad and dual degree options. Friends of mine studied part of their 2 year degrees in London, New York, Washington, Paris, Tokyo, Cairo, Milan and Moscow.

Hertie is the most Europe/EU focused of the public policy schools. It has EU staffers and former European Central Bank officials in its faculty. Most of the lessons focus on European issues (not German, specifically, but in recent years the two have been hard to disentangle). Some students were disappointed that they could not focus on geographical or thematic areas – such as Latin America or Conflict Resolution – so check out the rest of the policy schools before you choose one: most have a general area of interest/focus.

All MPP/MPAs are taught in English. You can travel the world and meet your fellow politics geeks at yearly student conferences like the European Public Policy Network or the Global Public Policy Network (which I attended in 2013). My graduating cohort contained students from 36 different countries, starting with Afghanistan all the way through to Uruguay. Friends have gone on to travel and work or study in many more countries. There aren’t many places in the world I can go and not find somebody in this network, sweating it out writing policy memos, ready to give me local tips and share a drink or two.

It’s not often in life that you will meet so many interesting people in such a short space of time (several of whom have written for this blog). In 20 years time, I’m sure that the most valuable thing to come from my time at Hertie won’t be the skills or ideas I learned, but the network of people I met.

Five characteristics of a happy Hertie MPP student:

1. You don’t want to be a specialist/you don’t know what you want to specialise in just yet.
2. You want to work in the public or nonprofit sectors (or in socially oriented business).
3. You value personal attention over big name recognition.
4. You care about the EU.
5. You are internationalist in outlook.

Oversimplifications Are Always Dangerous

With thanks to Warimu Gitau

“Imagine you are a thoughtful 22-year-old college graduate who wants to make a great difference in the world, he said, invoking one of his many thought experiments. Many such people try to get a job with Oxfam, the Gates Foundation, or any number of excellent charities. That’s fine. But if you don’t get that job at Oxfam, somebody just as smart and generous will get it instead. You’re probably not much better than that “next person up.” But imagine you go to work on Wall Street…

Yes, imagine you work in investment banking. You make $100,000 and give away half to charity. The “next person up” would not have done the same, so you have created $50,000 of good that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. Even better, your donation could pay for one or two workers at Oxfam—or any effective cause you chose to donate to.”

From an article on Effective Altruism by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic*

Now, I like thought experiments as much as the next guy, maybe a little more.

But this particular thought experiment seems designed specifically to lead to a specific conclusion – that the best way to give is through effective altruism. That’s because it relies on a couple of dangerous simplifications.

1. Money is the best way of giving.

From a broader perspective, this is clearly wrong. It can work in some situations with direct cash gifts to the poor (not mentioned here, this article speaks only of charitable donations). But we also know that donating large amounts of money can lead to horrible waste and corruption. The trick is actually managing the donations intelligently. And, hey, don’t we need smart people to do that job?

On an individual level, this is at the least a massive over-simplification. Economists are fans of translating each and every variable into dollar worth: this intervention costs X, this person is worth Y, therefore the intervention is too expensive by Z. But this sort of approach doesn’t measure many things. (As the article goes on to point out, this is a problem because easily measurable causes are given greater credence by practitioners of effective altruism).

What about personal relationships that develop from your work at Oxfam or the Gates Foundation? What if doing development work makes you more committed to making a great difference in the world? The path of an individual and the effects that path have cannot be quantified in terms of money alone.

Which leads onto the second issue I have with this thought experiment.

2. All workers are of broadly similar worth.

By a) stipulating that this is about a 22 year old recent graduate and b) including the line “you’re probably not much better than that next person up” the ‘experiment’ becomes easy. Of course it’s better to just pay for more Oxfam staffers with your Wall Street profits – would you make any more (or less) difference compared to someone else? No! Of course not! That’s just your ego speaking.

But surely there is a difference?

I work in an office filled with University educated professionals doing development work. Most people are in a broadly similar age range. Some people are trained in certain fields – banking, engineering, HR – while others work in communications or project management or technical support. Do I think we’re all of equal usefulness? Of course not!

A 22 year old engineering graduate is worth more in the development job market than a 22 year old philosophy student. Otherwise why do certain jobs demand higher remuneration immediately after graduation? Even setting aside that different individuals are of different ability in a work environment regardless of educational achievements or that some people might simply be better suited to this type of work for any number of reasons, qualifications most definitely matter. Does ‘the next person’ speak three languages? Do they know stats? Can they code?

It’s crazy to put all 22 year graduates in the same basket.

The choice of a young graduate is a way of downplaying these issues of individual ability. Imagine this same thought experiment but with a 35 year old seeking a mid-career change. Is it easy to out-earn your usefulness when things like your experience and your network come into play? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s much less clear cut than at 22.

Unless, of course, you take the given advice and become an enormous success on Wall Street. But guess what, The Atlantic itself reported that the rich are less willing to give than the poor and they tend not to give to organizations that focus on the poor.

“Last year, not one of the top 50 individual charitable gifts went to a social-service organization or to a charity that principally serves the poor and the dispossessed.”

So there’s another complication.

What I don’t like about this ‘thought experiment’ is that it is designed to lead you to a specific conclusion – it’s a marketing ploy, in essence. But it’s presented as a purely logical piece of scientific reasoning. Even by presenting it as a thought experiment rather than as a simple argument positions the conclusion in a very particular way.

While I don’t necessarily disagree with the work done by organisations like 80,000 Hours, my instinct is to baulk at this sort of disingenuous presentation of opinion as fact. Maybe I’m being too sensitive. But then that’s a flaw that “the next blogger” might not have.

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*I found this article through the subreddit ‘TrueTrueReddit‘. The whole article goes far beyond this one thought experiment and is well worth a read, it’s just the one part that got under my skin.

Course Reviews: Development at Tufts University’s Fletcher School

Don’t be fooled by its full name: The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy isn’t a law school or a Foreign Service training program. A graduate school at Tufts University, Fletcher’s course offerings cover the full range of topics in international affairs, including business, security, communications – and, of course, development.

Regardless of their specific field of study, all students in the school’s primary program earn a MALD (Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy). However, many graduates refer only to their area of focus – for example, by listing “M.A. in International Development” rather than MALD on their resumes. It’s a two-year, full-time, in-person program, and most students do an internship, often abroad or in D.C., during the summer.

Fletcher differs from many similar schools in the U.S. in that there’s no one track for studying development. So, how do you study development there? The school’s curriculum has two main components. The first is a breadth requirement, which mandates that students take classes from three categories: law, diplomacy and politics, and economics.

What? I thought you said it WASN’T all about “law and diplomacy!”

It’s still really not. The categories are broad, and each one has development-related classes: Law and Development, Political Economy of Development, and Development Economics: Policy Analysis, for example.

To fulfill the second component, the breadth requirement, students complete two fields of study.

But wait, I only want to study development!

Don’t worry, multiple fields of study focus on different aspects of development, like Development Economics, Law and Development, or Public and NGO Management. Some can also be tailored to emphasize development, like Human Security and International Organizations. And others can be complementary to development, like International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution if you’re interested in post-conflict reconstruction.

If none of that sounds quite right, you can also design a field of study to either complement or deepen your development studies. Some recent self-designed fields include gender studies, monitoring and evaluation, education, and social and political development.

The bottom line: as a Fletcher student, you can really study whatever you want, and you can keep your focus as broad or as narrow as you choose. Regardless, you’ll come out of the program with some background in both quantitative and qualitative work.

The perks of Fletcher

Besides the flexible curriculum, I think the school has three big draws.

Diversity

Around 40 percent of Fletcher students are international, and all areas of the world are represented. No matter what region you’re interested in, you’ll almost certainly have a classmate who can tell you what life is really like there. Because the school’s admissions process emphasizes professional experience, most students come into the program after working at least a couple years – and backgrounds run the gamut from finance to non-profit and the military to the UN. Students come in with a range of interesting international experience, and there’s a large population of former Peace Corps Volunteers and Fulbright scholars. Fletcher is a place where you’re guaranteed to be introduced to a host of new perspectives.

“The Fletcher Mafia”

Fletcher’s known for its close community feel – and, equally, its tight-knit alumni network. We’re not called The Fletcher Mafia for nothing! While most schools maintain alumni relations and provide opportunities for students to network with alumni, Fletcher goes further. Fletcher alumni really look out for their own. Students looking for internships and recent grads on the job hunt have access to the entire network of alumni – most of whom are more than willing to help out a fellow Fletcherite. And after graduation, you’ll inevitably find yourself with dozens of people to visit and couches to crash on, in all corners of the globe.

Cross-registration

Even though I doubt you’ll have too much trouble finding the courses you want at Fletcher, the school’s offerings are only the surface of the available classes. Fletcher students can cross-register in classes in nearly any other department at Tufts, as well as at Harvard’s business, public health, education, design, and Kennedy schools (and, unofficially, at a few other universities, including MIT). If like me, you’re interested in impact evaluation, there are hardly better professors to have than those at Fletcher, Kennedy, and the MIT Economics Department.

So, who is Fletcher NOT right for?

If you want to work while in school.

There’s no option for part-time, evening, or online study at Fletcher. If you’re looking to work full-time while in grad school, Fletcher’s not an option.

If you want to sit in a circle for discussion with five other students.

While some classes are very small, and many promote participation, a lot of classes have 30 to 60 students or more. You’ll probably be able to have a small-group discussion feel for a few classes, but it won’t be the norm. Many students, though, find that the sometimes large classes are offset by the fact that, because there’s no cap on class sizes, students can take all their top-choice classes each semester.

If you hate the cold.

The Fletcher School is in Boston, and it gets cold. But hey, that means you’ll get some snow days!

6 New Year’s Resolutions For Development Grad Students

With the New Year under way and a new semester just around the corner, development students are setting resolutions that will help them learn about the field and prepare them to embark on careers in international aid. The Guardian’s recent series on New Year’s Resolutions for Development Professionals prompted me to share some resolutions specifically for graduate students in development.

1. Read blogs

The aid and development blogosphere is rich with knowledge, opinions, and anecdotes about all aspects of the field, and provides a great complement to classroom learning. Reading blogs allows students to engage with the field informally, dig deeper into topics that interest them, keep up-to-date with new research, and see debates unfold in real time.

Though updates on many blogs have become less frequent lately, there are still dozens of excellent ones, with a tremendous amount to be learned from them. Some great bloggers to check out include Chris Blattman, Ken Opalo, Duncan Green, and the teams at WhyDev and Humanosphere. [Ed: we have an extensive reading list for the internet addicted bottom-rungers here]

On a related note, the aid Twitterati is very active and offers links to relevant posts and abridged versions of the discussion found on blogs. Both The Guardian and WhyDev recently posted lists of top development Tweeps to follow.

2. Read non-academic books related to the field

Students (myself included) often find it difficult to commit to doing much outside reading, but I’m not suggesting everyone study extra statistics textbooks in their spare time! Rather, I think reading non-technical books is a low-stress, enjoyable way to deepen our understanding of development and aid.

Books that informally address material learned in class can help the concepts sink in and give students a chance to see how these concepts get applied in the real world. Similarly, memoirs by aid workers offer insight into the life for which students are preparing themselves. For example, Zen Under Fire, written by a human rights lawyer about her experiences working in Afghanistan, thoughtfully discusses struggles many aid workers face in both their personal and professional lives.

Novels and non-fiction works set in developing countries can also provide a new perspective and some cultural understanding. For suggestions of books from (literally) any country of interest, take a look at A Year of Reading The World.

3. Connect with students in other schools and programs

No more reading resolutions, I promise! It has become very clear to me that there are many, many different ways to approach development work – public policy, anthropology, economics, public health, gender studies, business, even engineering. All these fields and many others offer their own approach to development, their own lens through which to view development issues, their take on the most important problems and the most effective solutions. Even among the APSIA schools, which offer somewhat similar degree programs, each school has its own bent on the study of development. Connecting with students from other programs and schools can offer great insight into the many approaches to development and enhance students’ understanding of the field at large. In short, resolve to attend a happy hour.

4. Learn a relevant computer skill

Admittedly more technical (and probably less fun) than the above resolutions, becoming proficient in a relevant computer skill can only be beneficial. In my job-search and networking experience, many organizations are looking for employees and interns who are skilled at Stata, ATLAS, GIS, CSPro, HTML, or other software or languages. Do some research to identify which one is most relevant to your goals, and see if it is taught in any courses or workshops at your school or through online tutorials.

5. Listen to foreign language podcasts

On a somewhat similar note, resolve to keep up a foreign language. Most students in international development speak at least one foreign language, though maintaining proficiency probably isn’t a priority for most students while they’re in school. Since you will likely be called on to use another language during internships and future jobs (including in interviews), it’s advantageous to stay familiar with it. I’ve discovered a simple way of doing this is to listen to foreign language podcasts while commuting, which at least keeps comprehension and vocabulary from getting too rusty.

6. Watch Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.”

At one point or another, regardless of the exact type of aid work you ultimately do, you will have the responsibility of portraying people from other countries. It could be in official reports for your organization, on a personal blog, during conversations with other aid workers, or in letters to your grandmother. For the sake of both dignity and accuracy, it is critical that portrayals – in whatever form they take – go beyond stereotypes, simplifications, or a “single story.”

Please share your own resolutions and recommendations for blogs, books, and other resources in the comments.