School of Public Management & Policy

All right, it's 5:00. I know we only have 1/2 hour for.

And jump right in. I see people joining us.

Welcome, Caitlin.

As well and welcome Lori. I'm going to go ahead and jump in to make sure that we have ample time for questions. Let's see just real quick how to.

How this forwards to the next slide?

Control slides. OK, so I think I've got control over the slides now.

Hopefully, yeah. All right. So so this is an overview of programs in the School of Public Management and Policy, and I'm going to start out. My name is Richard Funderburg. I'm associate professor in the School of Public Management Policy, and I'm also the academic lead for the Master of Public Administration program. With me today are doctor Yongjin Kong, who's going to talk about the Master of Arts.

In Human Services program.

Doctor Jungfeng Wong Yun Feng Wong, who's going to talk about the Master of Public Policy program. Doctor Matthew Sprung, who's going to talk about the Doctor of Public Administration program and then I'll return at the very end to just talk about the graduate certificates.

Anyway, feel free to to use the chat box to kind of call our attention if you've got some questions that raise in the course. We'd like to make this as interactive as as possible and you know, it's all about you guys.

We don't want to be, of course, talking heads, but we want to make sure that you have the information that you need about our program.

To, you know, make a judgment as to whether it's right for you. So let me start by just kind of talking about the Master of Public Administration program or the MPA. This is really our, you know, our our largest program within the school.

And it's currently a very highly nationally ranked program. It's #67 overall.

Of, you know, hundreds of of programs that are ranked nationally.

We are #67 and we're #26 nationally for the specialization of public finance and budgeting. So that's that's a pride point for us that we love to brag about that we do quite well in national rankings. This is the rankings for U.S. news and World Report, and we're also an accredited program, which is important to a lot of students. We are accredited by the network of schools.

Of public policy, affairs and administration.

NASA for short as we refer to it and again that's that's a a a point applied for for our program as well.

So what you're looking at for the Master's degree at the MPA, it's it's a 36 credit hour program.

Which basically constitutes 12 classes.

Four year classes are electives and the other eight.

I.

Our core required courses and So what what a common question that we get is what kind of jobs do people get with a degree in public administration? First of all, public administration is really a fancy term for government. So most of our students, as you can see here, more of our students go into state government than any other.

A sector. So for about 40% of our graduating students land careers in state government here in in Illinois, but in other states as well, we've had some, I know working in California, we've had some working in Iowa and other nearby states, some working in just about all across the United States. Same true for local government, about 20% of our students.

Or graduates are working in local government.

And then the rest are in nonprofit, private sector consulting and so forth. But generally speaking, this is for someone that has a real interest in public service and helping others.

In basically, you know interested in public policy and improving the lives of people, the kind of jobs that they get. Here I've I've listed a few you know the director of a a state or local or nonprofit agency.

Coming right out with a degree like this, you know, having really maybe limited other experiences, somebody could get a job as a budget analyst and we've we've had some students be able to land that job right away. City Manager of course is a little further out, but we have a couple of our graduates that are current city managers. Community planner is something that you could expect right out of our program and we do have a couple.

City planners, and specifically.

That are working nonprofit leader, program developer administrator. More recently our programs put a big emphasis on data analytics and Information Services. So you know information analysis, information systems and analyst positions are within reach from our program. So this is really again, you know just kind of a sampling of the kind of jobs that are graduates get.

As far as our faculty goes.

You know, many of our faculty have real world experience. I could speak for myself. You know, I I came up out of state government employment myself.

Working as a policy analyst for the state of California, later working as a a senior economist. So you know many of us also have very real world applied experiences as well and the kind of skills that we focus on are these five things we will teach you basically how to lead and manage.

Organizations within the public sphere will teach you how to participate actively and contribute to public policy making. We're going to teach you how to communicate.

With a public service perspective, spend a lot of time developing your analytical skills, get your hands dirty and some data and and some solving of problems. But overall too you know again that communication thing being able to communicate.

Effectively and work with diverse people. So last I just want to say that we are accepting applications now and we accept accept them continuously. So we we admit people into the program on a flow basis throughout the year. So that's it. I'm going to go ahead and turn this over to Doctor Kong who's going to talk about the the Human Services program.

Hello, my name is Yantin Kao. I'm an Associate professor of the Human Services Program within the school James School, and I'm also the academic agent of the Human Services Program. So Human Services Program has a lot of, you know, point of pride.

I I can't even like name them all, but I have several points that I wanna share with you #1.

Is WE Our program is best school number, my best school for Masters in Human Services by College bank, not net #1 Best Human Services and Graduate degree program in the State of Illinois by course advisor. And our program is also top 20 Best affordable online services semesters.

We offered, we offered. We offered certified fundraising executive.

We are certified from creating executive approved program.

And our student learning experience is really realistic and also.

Educational For example, we utilize the simulation training in views in the curriculum to prepare a student, so there is a link that you can check out. This is the interview by Doctor Bessie Golett or MPR and you can learn more about simulation training infused in the curriculum.

The next.

So we have different program options. Our program is a master's program, so regardless of concentration, student to complete 15 core credit hours and 18 concentration hours. So a total of 33 credit hours.

Other requirement within the program we offer five different concentrations social services, administration, child and family studies, concentration, alcohol and substance abuse concentration, gerontology and also nursing or demonstrations. Sweden to who want to pursue a dual degree can do that HMS and MPA joint degree and we also offer different certifications students who want to non degree programming.

Certificate programs are non degree program and student who want to do certificate they must complete 12 credit hours and we offer 400 certificates of certificate, certificate, gerontology certificate and also a nursing home administration.

So in terms of career path?

You know, there's a wide range of job placement that Human Services, you know, helping professionals can work.

Our students to work at public sector, private sector and even nonprofit sector and there are a lot of increasing needs filled.

In specific job placement. If you're interested in, you know, looking and and learning more about you know, job placement and you can check out the website that is listed on the public slide.

If you have any questions about HMS programming please you know, don't hesitate to contact me. Thank you.

Thank you, Doctor Kong. Now we'll turn it over to Doctor Wong, who will talk about the MPP.

I think you might be muted, Doctor Wong.

You're still muted.

He could hear you, but then then it went away.

Maybe, maybe I could just jump into this section. Is that is that OK? Yeah, OK. So the Master of Public Policy program is our newest program and this is just began. We started it in spring 2022 and we're actually graduating our first students in this spring. So we're really excited about that.

About 50% of the students in this program are online and the other half are on the on campus program.

And many of us teach in this program as well. So we can answer your questions in this. It's kind of similar in structure to the MPA, but the focus is different. The focus is really on on policy analysis, where the focus of the MPA is on administration. So it's similar though that it requires 36 credit hours and then eight of those are core and four are electives, but the courses are very different.

And you could see that in the MPP, students choose a specialization. And there's these five specializations, child Advocacy and policy, Education policy, Health Policy, Policy Analysis and social Policy. The core classes are different too in the MPP in that there's a little bit more focus on, like I said, data analysis. So for example, we have an informatics for public Policy class. That's a requirement in that.

We also have an economics and public policy class that's a requirement in the MPP. So again if you're if your interests are more on in terms of data analytics, information technology more kind of on the quantitative policy realm then in becoming an administrator the MPP program would be right for you. One thing we want to emphasize this is the affordability of our program and and we can provide you more information on this maybe we'll we'll talk more about this at.

In response to your questions.

But I provide you a link at the end of this to our page where where you could follow up, but you could see here total tuition fees and assessments for a semester are under $3000. So it's it's a pretty affordable program overall. That's it. I'm going to turn it over to Doctor Sprung so he could talk about the DPA program.

Can you hear me OK?

All right. Wonderful. Hi, I'm Doctor Sprung or Matt Sprong, director of the DPA program and.

We have a it's a 52 credit hour program and we do something called a high flux model. So essentially we have students that join us remotely, they're online students and we have students that join us on campus. So when you're taking a core class, you are seeing that you have students joining via zoom and you have students that are in the classroom attending synchronously. Our classes are in the evenings, usually from 6:00 to 9:30. What we try to do is when a new cohort comes in, we do a cohort model.

We try to give them the same day throughout their program. In terms of the core classes, students will have an opportunity to choose between one of three specializations, which you can see the bottom right organizational leadership and management, data modeling, analytics and policy analysis and program evaluation. We do customize it to some degree. We've gotten a few students that are interested in educational policy and administration, not necessarily.

To to move up into higher education, but really state government style a lot of students.

Come because they want to advance in their careers. Some do want to go into academia, but most want to advance in their careers, learn additional skills and and knowledge of of public management and policy and and so on. I would say that pretty much all of our students have several years of experience in public administration of some capacity. Some have 20 years, some have five years, some have probably more than 20 years. We have a good mix of students that are returning. They haven't been.

In in Graduate School in a long time and they're trying to reintegrate, but essentially it's a three to four year program.

It's made. It's developed and made for the person that's working full time. That's why our classes are in the evening and we do something called a rolling admittance policies. So we have people that are applying throughout.

This semester, next semester, this summer, and so on. And the reason we do that is we recognize that people are working full time. They have to try to get references and get transcripts and.

For part of our admissions, you have to submit a writing sample. So you know, it could be obviously a paper in grad school, a thesis, things of that nature.

But some people submit other things, documents that they've created at their place of employment or a prior place of employment. So they apply and we try to give them a decision within a couple weeks of their application. Once these students have completed their core coursework, they'll take something called qualifying exam and then eventually dissertation. So three to four years to complete cohort model. We try to keep it small for the most part, 12 to 15, we want professional work related experience that helps make it more of an enriched discussion during the classroom and.

We have some pretty phenomenal faculty. All the faculty here tonight have taught or will be teaching in the doctoral program And again, a lot of experience. My experience is in VA healthcare administration and nonprofit and then also some strategic and operational planning within the VA hospital system. So that's my experience. Everyone that teaches pretty much has a lot of experience in their chosen area.

And we produce a lot of publications and grants and other scholarly activities as well to help.

Students want to learn how to do that if they want to go into academia or they want to become familiar with the publication process. So there's a lot of opportunities for collaboration, writing, participating in research, and also textbooks and and things of that nature.

I'll let my colleagues add anything they want to add if they if I missed anything, but thank you.

Super. So I just wanna finish up by by talking about the graduate certificate programs. And so, you know, sometimes there's concern that you know by by some students. Hey, you know, I got an undergraduate degree and I might not have done that well in my undergraduate degree and I'm a little worried that I might not be able to get accepted into a graduate program.

The graduate certificate programs actually provide a great way of entry if you have that concern. It's a non degree program generally speaking that is available.

To students that might not otherwise meet the minimum GPA requirements for a grad program. So what the graduate certificate programs, basically they're comprised of our electives that electives that are used in either the the in any one of our programs. Actually all all all all of the ones that we've already talked about can use these electives, but the graduate certificate programs are so you can get a graduate certificate in alcohol and substance abuse.

In child advocacy studies, in Human Services fundraising, in community planning and nonprofit management, and in public procurement, and as I mentioned, these are available stand alone. So you could come in and and and acquire one of these. But in addition, there are the ones with the asterisks are offered as in conjunction with an MPA degree. What does that mean? It means that you can earn both the MPA degree.

And the certificate without any additional coursework, so you essentially get 2 credentials.

In the same time, it would take you to finish one. The difference here though is in doing this, all you're giving up is basically discretion over your electives. So instead, right right now, like if you do the MPP or the MPA or or whatever or or whatever program, you could pick your 12 credit hours of electives basically anywhere in the university. But if you decide to get a certificate along with the the MPA degree, you're giving up that discretion. And so you'll have to take very specific courses.

But again, the trade off is that you get 2 credentials for the same time it would take to finish one. So I I'm imagining you have a lot of questions and we want to turn it over the remainder of our time to you to ask us some questions. But here is where you would go For more information. Please e-mail us at spmp@uis.edu if you have questions. But also here's a link to our website and our phone number. We're always you know there to to speak with.

Potential students like yourselves that would be interested. So that said, I just want to turn it over and make sure be able to answer any of your questions.

You can either post them in the chat or I'm assuming everybody has mic capability, is that right, Lori?

Oh, there's no, there's no interaction.

OK.

I don't think so. Yeah, someone told me right before this that they just have to put all the questions in chat. I also want to add to what Richard was saying. If you had admissions questions, please feel free.

To e-mail admissions@uis.edu and we'll find the answers for you and move you right along to the process.

So yeah, if we don't, it doesn't look like we have any questions in chat. We'll give you a little bit longer here.

Umm.

I also want to point out that Doctor Wong has posted a link to the calculator that that that I referred to it for estimating costs in your particular circumstances. Really useful tool.

I.

Well, I I want to say thank you to all of our speakers. Thank you so very much. You had a lot of useful information.

Do you want to just? We can just wrap it up and feel free to e-mail.

The SPMP at uis.edu to reach out to these people or admissions@uis.edu if it's an admissions question and we'll be really happy to help you. Thank you.

Indeed. Thank you all.

Looks like.

Oh.

No, I don't think so.

Wait to know participants interested.

Up.

OK. I think that's it. Just go ahead and send an e-mail if you have questions for any of the speakers or e-mail admissions. We've really been happy having you all. Thank you. Have a lovely evening.

Yes, thank you all.

Bye, bye.