Programs
MPA in Sustainable Management
 
 

MPA Program Overview

Presidio prepares MPA students to lead in the public sector in a strategic and sustainable way. In today’s complex economic, social, and ecological landscape, there is unprecedented opportunity for skilled leaders to rethink policy and administration to create innovative and effective solutions for today’s public challenges.

Our unique public administration degree integrates principles of sustainable management into core coursework while building the skills to think systemically in addressing our most compelling issues—be it carbon market policy, energy, infrastructure, trade, or healthcare. Going beyond a traditional MPA, our program enriches students with the confidence and competencies to shift policy, program implementation, and public management in ways that both benefit society and create lasting change in public, private, and nonprofit organizations.

The most distinctive aspect of our MPA is the comprehensive integration of management education with public policy and administration learning. Students in the MPA program take classes with MBA students, gaining cross-sector management and collaboration skills through team projects and assignments. With an integrated curriculum the program is designed around three fundamental and connected concepts that together define competence in sustainable public administration:

Sustainable Systems
Principles of systems thinking and sustainability ground the entire curriculum and are woven into every course. A whole systems orientation rests on coursework in systems thinking, sustainable development, literacy, ethics, and social justice. Students learn to apply these concepts to shape public administration strategy, programs and practice.

Leadership
The transition to a sustainable future in the public sector requires the capacity to engender positive change through varying spheres of influence from the self, to teams, to institutions, and ultimately across systems. With an emphasis on collaboration, engagement, and cross-sector cooperation; the course work is designed to build competencies in personal efficacy, resilience, adaptability, stakeholder management, organizational change, human resources, management ethics, civic leadership, and decision-making.

Public Administration Foundations
Foundational courses focus on building practitioner-oriented competencies to develop and manage more sustainable civic, nonprofit, and governmental organizations. Coursework includes public administration and policy, research methods and policy analysis, public sector finance, managerial economics, macroeconomics, ecological economics, capital markets, public administration implementation, and information management and technology.

Program Format
The MPA is a 60-credit curriculum with 16 required courses. The program combines the effectiveness of face-to-face learning with the benefit of interactive distance-learning opportunities. Students have as much classroom time as any traditional MPA program. However, Presidio brings an additional level of learning with a robust, online component that develops indispensable management skills and facilitates virtual collaboration among students.

The full-time program spans two years and the part-time option spans four years. Each semester, concentrated classroom instruction takes place over a four-day residency (part-time students attend classes for two days). These residencies occur Thursday through Sunday once a month.

 

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