page_title: Public administration
section_title: Master's degrees
hierarchical_section_title: Public administration / Academic field / Master's degrees
caption_attribution_description: English: Campus du Havre (Sciences Po)
context_page_description: Public administration is the implementation of government policy and also an academic discipline that studies this implementation and prepares civil employees for working in the public service. As a "field of inquiry with a diverse scope" whose fundamental goal is to "advance management and policies so that government can function". Some of the various definitions which have been offered for the term are: "the management of public programs"; the "translation of politics into the reality that citizens see every day"; and "the study of government decision making, the analysis of the policies themselves, the various inputs that have produced them, and the inputs necessary to produce alternative policies."
  Public administration is "centrally concerned with the organization of government policies and programs as well as the behavior of officials formally responsible for their conduct".
context_section_description: Some public administration programs have similarities to business administration programs, in cases where the students from both the Master's in Public Administration (MPA) and Master's in Business Administration (MBA) programs take many of the same courses. In some programs, the MPA (or MAPA) is more clearly distinct from the MBA, in that the MPA often emphasizes substantially different ethical and sociological criteria that pertain to administering government programs for the public good that have not been key criteria for business managers, who typically aim to maximize profit or share price.
  The MPA is related to similar graduate-level government studies programs including Master of Arts (MA) programs in public affairs, public policy, and political science.  MPA degrees may be more likely to include program emphases on policy analysis techniques or other topical focuses such as the study of international affairs as opposed to MA degrees, which tend to focus on constitutional issues such as separation of powers, administrative law, contracting with government, problems of governance and power, and participatory democracy. Some MPA degrees may be more oriented towards training students to undertake public service work tasks, whereas some MA programs may have a more academic, theoretical focus. Some universities offer their Masters in public administration as an MA degree (e.g., Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and the University of Kerala in India).
  Some universities offer mid-career Master's programs, sometimes called an MC/MPA, that can be taken part-time (often outside of business hours) by public servants and public service managers who are working full-time. Community programs may offer internships or continuing education credits. One example is the Maxwell School's mid-career Masters at Syracuse University, which was launched by Robert Iversen in the 1970s.
caption: Sciences Po, Havre Campus
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