March 2001.

US News & World Report.

Career outlook: Public affairs 

"There's a lot of call for M.P.A.'s these days–in the government, in business, and at nonprofit groups."

By Frank McCoy.

Jason Dickerson once thought only "lifers" in the government could create public policy. So after finishing up at the University of Virginia in 1995, the public-service-minded grad went to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a liaison between the federal agency and state rural-development groups.

After a year, Dickerson headed off to get a master's at Syracuse University, where he discovered there would be many ways he could "make an impact." And he has. Since graduation in 1997 from SU's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, he has been helping influence policy in jobs at two private companies. As director of U.S. public finance at Fitch Inc., a credit-rating firm, Dickerson led a team analyzing the creditworthiness of water, sewer, and charter-school bonds. Today, as national revenue manager at Edison Schools Inc., a company that manages 113 public schools, Dickerson, 27, uses what Syracuse taught him about education finance and urban policy planning to figure out how states and school districts can pay for Edison's services.

Indeed, it's a wonderful time to have a master's in public affairs, public administration, or public policy, says Paul Light, director of the Center for Public Service at the Brookings Institution and author of the 1999 book The New Public Service. The looming retirement of tens of thousands of baby boomers in government jobs and the rapid growth in outsourcing of Uncle Sam's work to private firms have created demand on all sides for the skills that come with an M.P.A. or an M.P.P. They include the understanding of enormous and highly bureaucratic organizations, comfort in managing huge and complex budgets, and the skill to bring competing interest groups to the table.

So today the lifer of old can expect to be highly–and upwardly–mobile, says Light: Jumps from the public to the private sector or to a nonprofit and back again are the norm. Graduates of top schools such as Maxwell, the University of Southern California, and George Washington University in the District of Columbia enjoy starting offers that range from $50,000 to over $100,000 at consulting firms and investment banks, where they might advise corporate clients on how to meet environmental regulations, evaluate the efficiency of a Labor Department division, or design databases for state welfare agencies. Starting salaries range up to $40,000 at nonprofits and government agencies.

The baby-boomer effect. Regardless of President Bush's campaign promises to keep on trimming the fat in government, much of the opportunity will be in Washington. The new administration will have to begin replacing thousands of mid-to-upper-level civil servants in 2001, when many of the oldest baby boomers start to retire. By 2005, the Office of Personnel Management projects, for example, that 282,000 of the executive branch's 1.8 million full-time civilian employees working in the office of the president, 17 cabinet departments, and 87 independent agencies will leave. At the same time, there's been a shortage of young M.P.A. grads willing to take on highly bureaucratic government work. In 1973, 76 percent of graduates with M.P.A. and M.P.P. degrees began their careers in the public sector. By 1993, 49 percent did so, but only 30 percent joined the federal government. Now, estimates Light, roughly one third of each year's M.P.A. grads go into the public sector.

As a result, the federal government is scrambling to appeal to the public-spirited. Starting this year, agencies can opt to offer new hires who agree to stay on the job for three years as much as $6,000 a year in student-loan repayments, up to a maximum of $40,000. As of January, OPM, in response to a "highly competitive it labor market," raised the entry-level salary of information-technology experts by up to $9,000, depending on the candidates' experience and skills. The most highly qualified M.P.A. grads can apply to come in to government on the fast track, as a presidential management intern. The interns are hired into two-year positions at federal agencies at the GS-9 grade level, at salaries of roughly $37,000 per year. Upon completion of the internship, they are eligible for promotion to jobs at the GS-12 grade level, which pay between $45,000 and $54,000 per year.

Public employees who want to go private will find the degree plus government experience to be a powerful door-opener. Just ask Jeanne Bourgault, 36, who has parlayed a 1990 joint M.P.A. and master's in international relations from the University of Washington into influential public, private, and nonprofit jobs. The time she spent working for Uncle Sam was crucial to her recent success in leaving government, she says, because of the insights and contacts she gained. After serving as a presidential management intern at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she worked on the funding of a post-earthquake rebuilding project in Costa Rica, Bourgault became a U.S. foreign service officer in Russia. She helped coordinate support for the first democratic parliamentary election there–which inspired her in 1996 to become a private consultant to democratization projects around the world. This past January she became vice president of programs for Internews Network in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit that supports a key democratic institution, independent media, at a salary of "between $80,000 and $90,000."

But even brand-new M.P.A.'s are being snapped up now by private companies, which handle contract work worth $183 billion a year for the Department of Defense, the Federal Communications Commission, the Small Business Administration, and other agencies. Once, only M.B.A.'s might have done that work. Now firms look for people who "get" public sector needs and have private sector skills. Bill Purdy, chief executive of American Management Systems, a Virginia consulting firm that gets half of its $1.4 billion revenues from public contracts, has hired 45 to 50 M.P.A. grads since 1995 because they understand accounting, public finance, and organizational dynamics and are capable of running large, complex organizations. "I understand how the federal government works and what motivates its decision making," says Barton Phillips, who got his M.P.A. in 1995 from Carnegie Mellon University, where he took advantage of the school's strong concentration in information technology. Since coming to AMS right after graduation, Phillips, 30, has helped develop software used by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to gather and compare financial data.

Position of strength. Anyone preparing to pursue a degree now should consider that, like Carnegie Mellon's, many of the nation's 250 or so programs have defined areas of special strength. The University of Kansas excels at training city and county officials, for example. Graduates include the city manager of Fort Worth, Texas, the city administrator for Santa Barbara, Calif., and the Mecklenburg County, N.C., administrator. Jackson State University in Mississippi prepares students to work on transportation issues statewide. Cleveland State University, Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and Portland (Ore.) State University all have strong concentrations in nonprofit management.

The latter is an area that attracted Alejandra Batres Kwan, 29, a graduate of the University of Texas–Austin's program. Kwan united her interests in economic development and social issues by earning a combined M.P.A. and Latin American studies degree in 1998. She then joined ProTex, a statewide nonprofit group that works on issues related to criminal justice and healthcare access. Now, Kwan builds networks that grass-roots and public-policy interest groups will use to share information, then trains them to take the networks over from ProTex. She welcomes the chance to serve as both a manager and a mentor, she says, and to do some good unhindered by red tape.