Public Management and Policy

Yesterday, and really, students would prefer to to hear from our world class faculty. I'll probably step off.

OK, I'll be here in the background, you won't be able to see me.

No ohh no worries I'm if if y'all don't have any any issue with it I'll probably step off.

But I think the students enjoy hearing from the director. Maybe you could just do a short introduction and then turn it over to us.

That's perfect.

Thank you.

OK, we should have folks starting to come in.

All right, welcome everyone. We're going to give just a couple seconds for people to get all logged in and connected.

OK, I have just a couple housekeeping announcements before I turn it over to our faculty. We welcome everyone. My name's Catherine Coleman. I am part of the admission team here at the University of Illinois, Springfield. Before we get started, going to go over a few things, just so you're aware.

Our webinar is being recorded today and will be made available after this for viewing, so don't feel like you have to take notes frantically as they're going through everything.

Within your screen, you'll see that there's a closed captioning option. It's at the bar on the top right corner. With the little, it's a button with the little CC on it. Right next to it is the option to make your video full screen if you would like to do that as well. If for some reason you should need to resync your audio or video at any point during the presentation, just refresh your browser and that should clear things up. Our presenters would love for you to ask questions in the chat.

Feel free to post those throughout. Um, they'll be looking at those and starting to answer them throughout the session. And at the end of the session, they'll make sure they go through them. So please feel free to post them in there. I know there are a lot of people excited to hear their information, so with that, I'm going to turn it over to our faculty and our staff from our School of Public Management and Policy to tell you about their program today. Thank you.

We are so excited to have you are participating in in the program in in this webinar. My name is Doctor Todd Dooley. I'm the director of the school management and policy and I have with me some amazing faculty who we're going to share with you. What we have to offer were the 29th rank school public policy and management for budgeting and finance. We're 70th overall among all schools of public affairs administration.

That puts us in the top 25%. We've got a number of exciting programs here, our award-winning public Masters in Public Administration program. We have an MPP program, Masters degree in public policy, if you are interested in a little bit more more technical aspects from that standpoint. And we've got a variety of Human Services and masters in that and a variety of certificates and undergraduate program as well. So I'm just happy to that that you're interested, we're excited.

About your interest, and I'm going to turn it over to my amazing faculty.

Well, thank you, Ty. It's a pleasure to be here. We're so excited and it's it's always fun to talk to prospective students and especially international students are considering coming to the US to study. My name is Beverly Bunch and I focus in budgeting. I've been at University of Illinois, Springfield for 20 years and that's because I love the environment here. We're located in the state capital.

We're engaged in the community and we've got a great group, group of colleagues, faculty colleagues and students, and I'll let my colleagues introduce themselves.

My name is Ken Kriz, and I am the University of Illinois distinguished Professor of Public administration. I've been at UIS for five years, but I've been teaching for close to 25 years.

I my areas of research interest are public budgeting, financial management, risk management, pension fund management and things like that. I teach courses in budget and finance.

In the MPA program and of course called information for decision making and I teach in the MPP program also our brand new MP program, I Teach forecasting class and then in the doctoral program I teach the quantitative research methods class.

So I'll turn it over to my colleague, Sean.

We can't hear you, Sean.

While Sean signing on, I've posted it would be fun to hear where where participants are from, what countries, or what cities you're joining us today.

OK, I think Sean will continue to try to join us, and I think we want to talk about a couple of the different degree programs we have. I'll start by talking about the masters of public administration. It's a 36 hour degree program and there's required courses you take, and then you get to take electives and you can choose to do what's called a graduate certificate as part of that work. And then you take classes that we've identified are associated with that topic, such as community planning.

Or nonprofit organizations. Most of the classes meet on campus one day a week, primarily at night because some of our students work during the day. But it's a very versatile degree. It allows you to go work for a federal or state or local government or go back to the country where you would like to serve if you're from. If you're an international student also allows you to work in nonprofit organizations or with for profits that are interact with the government. So in some ways it's.

One of our most versatile degrees.

And maybe you want to give a little overview of that MPP degree?

Well, I finally found the unmute button. So.

The MPP program is similar to the MPA program, but it much more stresses kind of analytical techniques and the analysis of public policies.

Um, so missing some of the kind of manage more management components of the MPA program, but adding in more emphasis on statistical and other types of research analysis as well as some more economic type of perspectives. So the MP is a 36 credit hour program, can be done on campus or online, typically with the typical schedule we'll get you through in 16.

The to to 24 months. So there's the MP and then there are a number of certificates you can also add on top of that.

Uh, so the core curriculum, uh?

Is 5 courses long, so that would be 15 credits. So you have 21 credits to.

Choose from there are a number of concentrations you can have, so you can have a policy analysis concentration and education policy concentration, a health policy concentration.

A child advocacy and policy concentration or a social policy concentration. So that's that is an addition to the kind of the core coursework and would allow you to kind of become a specialist in one type of policy or not. But you don't have to do that. You can have a just a straight MPP program that would allow you to to kind of sample from different course areas.

Son, are you?

We still can't hear you.

Well, you're gonna have to start typing into the the chat. Tell people a little bit about yourself if you would do that.

And one of the good things about UIS, we're a fairly small university. We're part of the huge University of Illinois, which has campuses and Champaign, Urbana in Chicago. But our campus here in the state capital is about 4000 students and most of our classes are fairly small in the graduate program between 10 and 20 and students. And so you really get to know the faculty well, as well as your fellow students. And as Doctor Chris said, you can do one of the concentrations or certificates, but if that's not what you want to do.

And your advisor will work one-on-one with you to select the courses that best meet your needs.

Yeah, and I would also mention that that there are a number of internship programs that can help with the cost of your education. Our graduate Public Service intern program is, I think a national model for this type of thing. It allows you to be placed directly into a government organization and.

The the ability to help finance your education as well as the access you get to to high level decision makers is really I think A plus.

Yeah.

Yeah. And the number of our students see some of them get offers from the state agency they worked at or other state agencies or one of my students got offer in a different state to work for the federal Social Security Administration, our pension system plan here in the United States. So it just opens a lot of doors, plus it enriches our classroom discussions. People can apply and discuss what they're seeing in the workplace to what we're talking about in the classroom.

So you need to watch the deadlines for that. There is a special webinar on the GPS I graduate Public Service internship program on Thursday, so I encourage you to watch that or if you can't make it, to watch the recording. And it's a competitive program, but they have over 200 positions, so it serves the university broadly and is open to all graduate students, not just public administration or public policy.

Another question that sometimes comes up is our prerequisites in the MPA program. For example, we have prerequisites if you're an international student for American government, and then for all students, we have a microeconomics prerequisite, but you can be admitted prior to taking those courses. So Ken and Doctor Chris and I both teach budgeting, and before you take budgeting, you need to have American government and economics, but you can do that once you're enrolled in our program.

So don't let that discourage you. And then if you're a student that was educated in the US, most likely you've had American government course either as part of high school or undergraduate, and so that is often waived.

I think one of the things that makes our, our, our faculty as strong as they are is our engagement with government issues. Doctor, Chris, you want to share some things that you've done in terms of community engagement?

Sure. I've been involved working with communities on different projects for almost all the 25 years that I've that I've been in this business.

Um. I've worked with many state and local governments on on areas like revenue forecasting budgetary analysis.

Efficiency analysis, economic impact analysis. Right now we have myself along with Doctor Dooley and then Doctor Blandon, blankenberge her and Wong from our faculty. We're engaged in a multi year evaluation of some social service programs in the state of Illinois. So that involves a kind of learning more about the programs, what they're trying to accomplish and then helping them measure kind of how.

They're doing in terms of program goals, meeting their program goals and helping them become better service delivery programs.

We're also working with a local nonprofit organization that hosts a big golf tournament.

In in in Springfield during the summer. So we're working on an economic impact analysis to help them again be able to tell the story of how, how they affect the community and in positive ways. So we, we are involved. You know, I'd say every, every.

Semester, there's two or three projects that are done directly with the local community, but also communities outside of the local area. We also have a related entity called at USC called the Center for State Policy and Leadership.

Doctor Bunch and again, Doctor Mccanlis and I are, are, are, are involved with that organization. So that's an applied research organization and they do applied research and evaluation projects throughout the region and the state.

And oftentimes they'll bring faculty from our school into to help on those type of projects. Beverly, do you want to talk about what you're doing?

Yeah. And and we tried to include students to the extent we can with those projects. For example, a recent issue that came up in the city of Springfield, the mayor reached out to the faculty in our Center for State Policy and Leadership and asked if we would be willing to help with what's called a teen empowerment zone. And this is designed to help youth, primarily teenagers and primarily in low income areas to understand their opportunities they have and to discourage them from participating in crime.

And so he he is the mayor's interest in having us do research on evidence based practices. What kind of engagement is it learning about technology, talking about careers, can we use in this new facility to try to engage the youth and develop relationships and mentoring? And so it'll involve nonprofit organizations and the city government and our university and we're really looking forward to the partnership and combining what we as academics know from our.

Studies with what the city knows from their interacting with these youth.

Doctor Chris, maybe we should talk a little bit about the doctoral program, in case someone's interested in that now or might be in the future. You want to start us off.

Director.

Thank you.

Sure, I wish Doctor Mccanlis was here because he he's the associate director of the program. But I can, I can, I can back, I can be a pinch hitter for him. So the the doctorate in public administration program is the only the only doctoral program on campus. It's an applied but research type of a program.

So it it again kind of has the elements of a strong research program, but also doing working with the community.

So so the the core of the doctoral program is is a sequence of 6 core courses in areas like public sector and social sector leadership, public policy, management, research, methods, research, design.

And I'm sorry I said public policy already. Then there are 16 hours of elective coursework and.

And there it's kind of organized into 3.

Fields of specialization.

Organizational leadership and management, data modeling and analytics, and policy analysis and program evaluation.

So you see a lot of overlap between the MPA kind of certificates or an MPP concentrations and the DPA.

Specializations.

We we require a dissertation at the end. That's a that's a a long research project that results in a in a dissertation, a long thesis that you write in collaboration with an advisor and a committee.

And we we try and prepare graduates so that they can finish within three to four years. The other thing I should mention is we the the DPA is organized into a cohort model.

So the uh the.

We admit 10 to 15 students at a time.

And everybody starts together, everybody takes the same sequence of of core courses together. And what we found is that this kind of aids a sense of commonality and a sense of community within the degree program, which is, I think more essential than than than in other programs, because the DPA is such a a strenuous lift for a for a a field of study.

It looks like we have a question in the chat. Somebody says they have a bachelors in accountancy and a certified accountant with the Institute of Chartered Accountants. What are my chances of being admitted? Well, you've hit this grid topic for both Doctor Chris and myself because we love accounting, financial management, accounting, budgeting. And so I, you know, the admissions process, you do have to write a statement about why you want this.

Particular degree, and also we look at your classes you've taken in your grade point.

We do try to turn around things fairly quickly within two to three weeks. So I would encourage you to go ahead and get your application in. And we have accountants in the program now and some of them want to take more accounting classes. So one of them over at the College of Business taking an internal control class and some of them are wanting to expand out into other areas. And Doctor Chris is an expert at many of the sophisticated financial management practices such as pensions and debt.

And investment and forecasting. And myself, I like to look more at the budgeting, the interdisciplinary aspects and intergovernmental aspects. So if you have an interest in finance, definitely please apply.

Yes, I assume you'll be when you're talking about the the Masters degree.

The you know the Masters degree as Doctor Bunch said is is. The admission to the Masters degree is based upon grade point average. You know your previous courses you know.

You stand as good a chance as any of of being admitted, and we hope you would would consider that.

And it's not all work. Our students do enjoy socializing and if things slow down a little during the COVID pandemic as we move primarily online. But we're back now to doing classes on campus, and the students are enjoying being back. I know I taught a budgeting class once a week.

After class, the students all joined in. When we're out there playing volleyball, they also the internship interns have a soccer, I guess what some of you call football intermural that they like to play. And I think maybe the public administration also has a team, a little competitive and but all different levels.

Should also talk to us a little bit, uh, if you're not familiar with Springfield, IL. As I said, it is a state capital. It has a population of about 116,000. It's pretty much in the central of Illinois. So it's about 3 hours from the city of Chicago by train, which goes right downtown Chicago, and then also about an hour and a half from Saint Louis. So if you like to get urban exposures, the big cities aren't that far away.

But there's a lot of public transportation in our city. Some grad students live on campus, we have nice campus housing, and some choose to live in the community. Some bring their own cars, some rely on the bus system. And we are getting a nice mix of international students from different countries. And so I think it's it enhances our our classroom discussions and we we enjoy the comparative aspects.

Um, the minimum GRE is 2.5, but that doesn't guarantee that you'll get in and we will give a close look to it. And clearly we we expect and want higher GPA's, but that is the minimum.

And maybe, Catherine, can you help us? There's a question about application fee waiver code.

Let's see if she's on, and if not, then we can get back to you.

Oh, there, she's replied.

Catherine, maybe do you want to just briefly talk about the fee waiver, how that works?

Sure. Um. So students who are eligible for a fee waiver is based on financial need, typically or.

There are a few categories people who are veterans of military service in the United States, some employees of the state of Illinois, employees of the University of Illinois system, are eligible for application fee waivers. But other than those small categories, all of our application fee waivers are based on financial need.

And typically those are documented from your FAFSA that you submit for financial need or you can have a official document that from your sending institution. So if you are currently enrolled in an undergraduate program somewhere, a financial aid official at that institution can document that there is a fee waiver, application, fee waiver form on our website and then.

There are all the categories of who can document that and sign off on it for you and I will post the link for that forum in the chat.

Doctor Chris, I think there was another question. Do you have TA positions available for the MPA?

Yeah, unfortunately we really we we don't have any kind of specifically set aside. Occasionally there will be one that'll be on an ad as needed basis the the the more common type of a.

The more common type of a placement would be for a research project. As I said, we we we will hire people. We're in the process of hiring.

Someone right now for the for the evaluation project that that we that I talked about. So that's going to be kind of on a on a project by project basis.

Yeah.

We also have graduate assistants, and they work on campus with departments or with other entities on campus. And they may be involved in research projects as Doctor Chris was referring to, or they may be involved with administrative tasks like if we want to add a new concentration, they may do research in terms of what the career demands are for that. And so there's both the graduate Public Service internship, the graduate assistants and then a few research assistants.

But then also once you're here on campus, then we do hour lies with hiring of research students, students to help with research.

Other questions?

Well, I think we're pretty much coming to the end of our session. I on behalf of the School of Public Management Policy, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. We'd be glad to follow up individually with ever whatever questions you may have and let me read some more. Just came in. We're giving you links to the GPS I program graduate assistantship. Good.

When somebody said they're gonna send their application materials in today, good for you. We'll look forward to receiving it.

Day.

Doctor Christie, you want to make a few closing comments?

You know I I think what I would stress is that the big advantage of coming to UIS over over other programs is our integration with the the state and local governments within the region. You know being in Springfield gives us a huge advantage. You know it's literally a 10 minute drive to the state capital and we can you know go visit agencies or you know be involved in different programs so.

You know, I I think if you want that type of experience where you're really integrating and not just reading out of books or or something like that, I think US would be, should be a, you know, near the top of your list.

Yes.

And I see that Doctor McCandless has put his e-mail into the chat. He is one of our most awesome professors, so please take advantage of his willingness to chat with you. He specializes in social equity and his nationally has a national reputation.

OK.

Sean, I think you're on if you wanna say some real quick.

Oh oh, am I on now?

Yep.

Yeah, yes, we can.

Oh, well, hello, everyone. I'm, I'm sorry. It took me 27 minutes. Computer decided to update. So, so again, thank you, Doctor Bunch. Thank you, doctor Chris. Thank you, director Coleman. My name is Sean. I worked at US since 2018. I'm also associate director of the doctoral program. My specialty is in social equity, although I'm also doing some work on emotional labor. Happy to talk about our doctoral program. We have an amazing doctoral program. We also have an amazing MPA program. We have students who go through a program and they say.

I'm applying what I'm learning right now to my public sector agency, to my nonprofit. You know, people who work in private business. It's really a fantastic program. I hope you consider applying and be great to see you, and also ECU as well. So again, my apology, please write to me.

OK, I think we'll turn it back to director Kleeman to close this out.

All right. Well, thank you, Beverly, Ken and Sean for joining us today. And if you have further questions, please feel free to reach out to their program or to any of them individually. They'd be happy to answer questions and give us about a day or so to get the recording process to get out on our website if you'd like to review it. Thank you so much for joining us and have a great day or night wherever you are.

Right.

Bye everyone.