Courses

This course will train students to obtain, clean, manipulate, analyze, map, and visualize spatial and non-spatial data to support their work throughout their urban planning careers. The course emphasizes the critical role of design and communication in effective data storytelling. Students will practice the open-source tools R and QGIS in depth. The course will help students build a strong foundation in working with data that will allow them to learn and master additional programs, languages, and tools toward future goals.

In the context of an increasingly polarized American society, this course seeks to train students to mobilize diverse faith communities together for the greater good. Unleashing the power of their own story, students will articulate their values and explore the ways it can be shared. The course will draw on case studies from historical and contemporary faith leaders who have achieved success in creating sustainable change, as well as interrogating relevant current affairs as they arise.

In study after study, people lying on their deathbeds overwhelmingly say they regret five things at their end of their life: 1. Not living a life of authenticity 2. Working too hard at the expense of their relationships 3. Not having the courage to express their feelings 4. Not staying in touch with friends. 5. Not letting themselves be happier. For leaders, it's not any different.

In a complex and difficult world, some idealism is needed to energize meaningful change. This course is for aspiring policy-makers who want to combine a necessary sense of optimism with real-world understanding of how to get things done. Each session will focus on specific examples of how practical solutions were found to seemingly intractable problems.

Open only to students in the MSPP program. This intensive course will provide students with: 

• An understanding of basic statistics principles 
• Familiarity with Stata
• Experience manipulating data and reading outputs in different formats 
• A working knowledge of basic microeconomics concepts 

This course is pass/fail.

Reforming education policy and finance are at the center of intense debates at all levels of government, driven in part by the recognition of the central role that education plays in the economy. Education affects the productivity of the labor force, the distribution of income, economic growth, and individuals’ earnings and quality of life. This course uses economic principles to analyze K-12 education. The course begins with an examination of the demand for education, both by the private sector (particularly individuals) and the public sector.

Multiple regression is the core statistical technique used by policy and finance analysts in their work. In this course, you will learn how to use and interpret this critical statistical technique. Specifically you will learn how to evaluate whether regression coefficients are biased, whether standard errors (and thus t statistics) are valid, and whether regressions used in policy and finance studies support causal arguments.

Elections In Action is for those that are interested in learning how a campaign works from start to finish. Whether one is working a local to national campaign the structure is still the same. This seven-session course will provide an overview and training in modern day campaign planning and implementation all the way from preparing as a candidate, staff roles, media, fundraising and Get Out the Vote strategies.

Couples with CAP-GP.3149.

R is a powerful open source language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. R provides a wide selection of statistical and graphical techniques. It is rapidly becoming the leading language in data science and statistics. R can easily tackle linear and nonlinear modelling, statistical tests, time series analysis, classification, clustering and more.

The purpose of this 5-session workshop is to equip students with the basic foundations necessary to leverage the Python programming language and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in a public policy setting. As such, this course will cover variables, dictionaries, lists, loops, functions, and other concepts required to interact with a RESTful API.

In 2016, the United Nations Secretary General noted in the World Humanitarian Summit Outcome Report that, “Armed conflicts and other violent situations, disasters caused by natural hazards and the impacts of climate change, health threats, soaring inequality and increased fragility marked by extreme poverty and weak institutions are among the factors contributing to the unprecedented spike in humanitarian needs.” In 2020, the world was further destabilized by the Covid-19 global pandemic leaving the humanitarian sector further extended and in desperate need of a radical rethink.

This workshop provides participants with the fundamental steps of how to plan and implement transformation initiatives using the PMP methodology and best practices. Project Management forms the basis for effectively delivering improvements to business processes, deploying new technologies, transformation using data and metrics and communicating change management.

Effective development, planning execution and communication of special projects are critical to all types of public service organizations. Service organization, health providers, nonprofits and government organizations constantly pursue new initiatives and projects to address the demands of their constantly changing environment. This course offers an introduction to the basic concepts and methods for directing projects and provides students with tools that prepare them for success as a project manager. 

This course introduces the theory and practice of institutional reform in developing and transitional countries. It reviews the evolution of international development paradigms, examining how the role, structure, and management of institutions, the public sector, and non-governmental organizations have changed in response to shifting economic and political trends, with a particular emphasis on accountability. The focus is on major institutional and managerial reforms intended to promote good governance as less developed economies liberalize and their societies democratize.

Capital is but a tool – one that can be used for many different purposes. This course explores the use of finance as a tool for social change.

In the US, Health is a privilege, not a right. Approaches to health in this country have focused on treatment and cures, rather than prevention and care. Studies have shown that your zip code, where you live, matters more to your health than your genetic code. Concurrently, data continues to emerge that trauma, and the effects of trauma, can be passed through our genes, from generation to generation, suggesting that enslavement, forced displacement, and poverty of our ancestors are felt in our bones, today.

This course builds on the material from the core Financial Management class to further develop skills in managerial and financial accounting. The course covers the recording process (journal entries, T-accounts, adjusting entries, and closing entries), financial statement modeling, and financial statement analysis. In addition, students will learn more about for-profit accounting and corporate structure, as well as how financial management differs across the government, not-for-profit, and for-profit sectors.

This class will utilize a hands-on and practical approach to understanding reproductive healthcare in the context of policy and management. Students will have the opportunity to think through real-world case studies and engage with relevant reproductive healthcare topics. Such topics include contraception, abortion, forced sterilization, abuses of power, gender, and gender identity.

Open only to students in the MSPP program. Students will learn the fundamentals of budgeting and accounting for public, health, and nonprofit organizations. Through readings, lectures, real-world case studies, and assignments, students will gain an understanding of how to use financial information in organizational planning, implementation, control, reporting, and analysis. In addition, students will have the chance to develop their spreadsheet skills by using Excel to perform financial calculations and create financial documents.

This course introduces students to the main areas of corporate finance and how they relate to policy issues and discussions. The course covers topics in the three main areas of corporate finance: 1) capital structure (financing choices), 2) valuation (project and firm valuation) and 3) corporate governance (optimal governance structures). We will analyze how public policy, through taxes, public expenditures and regulation, affect these aspects of corporate finance.

Continuation of CAP-GP.3601.

In the coming decades, water will be the central issue in global economic development and health.  With one in six people around the world currently lacking access to safe drinking water (1.2 billion people), and more than two out of six lacking adequate sanitation (2.6 billion people), water is already a critical factor affecting the social and economic well-being of a sizable proportion of the world's population.  However, with the world's population projected to double in over the next fifty years, and with rapidly dwindling water supplies becoming both more scarce and more vol

This course is designed to help students understand and make their own mark in today’s revolution in how to innovate.  Although the world still needs dedicated innovators of all kinds to create the new combinations of ideas for solving to difficult social problems, this course is based on the notion that durable social change depends on five tools for innovating in how to innovate: (1) innovative social exploring to call others to action and identify the root cause that needs to be addressed, (2) innovative social finance to leverage existing funding toward high-impac