School-wide Focus Areas

Cities—how they function, what they mean for people’s lives, and the systems and policy areas—fundamentally shape the urban environment. This Focus Area explores the broad sets of analytical, policy, and management skills to inform infrastructure, design, and thoughtful planning throughout cities.

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Storytelling is at the heart of inspiring change. This Focus Area concentrates on the skills necessary to tell persuasive stories across written, oral, and visual platforms to communicate in careers centered on public service, non-profit management, government, advocacy, planning, and consulting.

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The tools of data science and analysis, and the skills needed to manage increasingly complex data environments, are increasingly fundamental across all realms of public policy and service. This Focus Area provides opportunities to pursue quantitative analysis, data visualization, database design, as well as the technical expertise to address policy and management issues.

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The future of education, including the policies and environments that influence it, needs thoughtful public service leaders. This Focus Area provides students with in-depth knowledge of evidence on the current issues and effects of policies in the United State’s K-12 system as well as higher education.

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Environment and climate change pose some of the most deeply seated public policy dilemmas, and in turn imply fundamental challenges to creating and managing sustainable infrastructure. This Focus Area covers fundamental challenges in the field and how to design policy that points to possible solutions. 

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How can we improve healthcare access and quality—while lowering costs? What are the links between a community's state of health and its housing, transportation, and education? This Focus Area aims to develop students’ knowledge and skills for careers as managers and policy analysts in the field of healthcare services.

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Understanding the intersection of policy and inequality is vital for our future. This Focus Area includes courses that allow students to examine the causes and consequences of inequality (broadly defined) with an emphasis on the roles of policy in distributing opportunity and disadvantage.

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Contributing to a better world begins with understanding the forces that have brought us here. This Focus Area explores international institutions, economics, and politics as well as ways to spark action through investment and advocacy.

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This Focus Area allows students to develop an understanding of the complex world of public service organizations and enhance the ability to navigate them by clarifying their institutional logics, constraints, core functions and critical tasks associated with their “public” nature.

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Philanthropic engagement, and its ability to create change, is essential for building capacity within public service fields. This Focus Area aims to explore how organizations develop strategies for effective grantmaking, optimize their marketing and fundraising efforts, and execute cross-sector models of philanthropy.

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Staff in government agencies and nonprofit organizations often need to understand what works—whether policies are effective, or whether organizational changes are having their intended effect. This Focus Area is for students who want to prepare for this work and develop frameworks for thinking about evaluation, as well as skills for collecting and analyzing data.

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An unprecedented crisis challenges the social, political and economic achievements gained since World War II in liberal democratic systems. This Focus Area allows students to examine current social and political circumstances as well as the tools for critical thinking, awareness, reflection and collective action.

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Understanding transportation requires a thorough understanding of its social implications, its potential to improve lives, and its role in the sustainability of communities and infrastructure. This Focus Area offers insights into data analysis, the role of landscapes, and the future of technology policy and planning in transportation.

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