Master’s degree requirements

The degree requires 42 hours of graduate credit including core public administration courses, an area of specialization, electives, and, for pre-service students, an internship.Full-time students are normally able to complete the degree in two years. The core courses are designed to familiarize all students with the fundamentals of public administration. The six courses in this category are Research Methods, Public Personnel Administration, Policy Analysis and Evaluation, Public Organization Theory, Public Budgeting, and Capstone Seminar in Public Administration.

Each student is also required to develop an interdisciplinary area of specialization, such as budgeting and finance, personnel administration, planning, international and comparative administration, not-for-profit management, or state and local government. However, other areas of interest specific to individual students are met on a case-by-case basis under special circumstances with the advice of the director of the program.

Students also take two political science electives, one of which must be a seminar. This component of the curriculum helps students to gain a better appreciation of the political environment in which public administrators operate. Students may choose from an extensive range of graduate courses and advanced seminars regularly offered by the Department of Political Science.

Pre-service students are required to complete an internship, involving a minimum of ten weeks of fulltime employment in an administrative capacity. This may involve appointments with public or not-for-profit sector employers. Students in this degree program have been unusually successful in previous competitions for prestigious internships such as the Kansas Governor’s Fellows Program and the U.S. Presidential Management Fellowship Program.