Public Administration, City Management Concentration, M.P.A.

Public Administration (M.P.A.)

Coordinator: Charles N. Coleman, Assistant Professor, M.P.A., West Virginia University

The general purpose of the master of public administration degree is the training of men and women at the graduate level for public service careers. Specifically, the program strives to:

• equip students with modern analytic and quantitative tools of decision making and their application to complex problems of government and nonprofit organizations;
• expose students to the wide range of administrative and managerial problems and responsibilities in the public sector; and
• increase the student’s knowledge and skills in the particular management functions of budgeting, planning, public policy formulation, public finance, public personnel administration, and collective bargaining.

The Department of Public Management in the College of Business hosts a chapter of the Public Administration Honorary Society (Pi Alpha Alpha). The National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration awarded the chapter to the university in 2003 after a rigorous examination of the quality of UNH’s Public Administration program.

Concentration in City Management

The courses in this concentration enable local government practitioners to develop and make better use of their personnel and budgetary resources. This ability is especially important today, as the federal government is reducing its fiscal support of local governments.

Students choosing the concentration in city management take the required core curriculum of nine courses and follow the city management concentration in lieu of their five elective courses.

• PA 630 - Fiscal Management for Local Government
• PA 661 - Problems of Metropolitan Areas
• PS 616 - Urban Government