For workers employed in the public and nonprofit sectors, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program offers the potential for full forgiveness of federal student loans for those with 10 years of full-time work experience. A year-long waiver issued by the Department of Education in 2021 to address administrative problems in program access…

For administrators of higher education public service and outreach (PSO) units at public research institutions, the opportunities for service to their states are broad. These administrators' efforts in research, technical assistance, and training address critical needs in their states. Yet all units face limited resources, and the administrators…

Aspects of public service often involve tasks sometimes considered taboo, including working with grit, grime, blood, guts, grease, and stigmatized populations. Yet scholarship in our field directly incorporating dirty work remains limited yet growing. Importantly, if MPA students are not trained in how to work with and manage public sector…

This study evaluates faculty efforts to accommodate graduate students in the Tarleton State University Masters of Public Administration and Masters of Criminal Justice programs called away from classes in the first weeks of the 2017 academic year as disaster responders called into duty by Hurricane Harvey. The evaluation employed a theoretical…

This paper explores how alumni of a multi-term public service program understand the connection between the program and their career development. Qualitative data were collected from 393 alumni based on six open-ended survey questions. While career and professional development is not an explicit goal of the program, a thematic analysis suggests…

The work of crafting sustainable solutions to complex policy problems requires decision makers and implementers to secure buy-in from a diverse set of stakeholders. Those stakeholders operate in policy ecosystems that span public, for-profit, nonprofit, and entrepreneurial sectors. This increasingly complex landscape requires schools of public…

Despite repeated calls to temper the bureaucratic ethos and its associated process-oriented pathologies with more of a democratic ethos grounded in normative values and the public interest, the practice, research, and teaching of public administration continues to largely perpetuate the former. In this paper we build upon the work of Camila…

This paper discusses the challenges of professional education for mid-career public managers at graduate level, pointing out pitfalls to avoid and obstacles to face. Analyzing the Brazilian case, the goal is to raise issues that may also be present in other cases. The main argument developed here is that the puzzle faced by graduate programs on…

This study examined English teaching and learning (Grade 8 level) in Qawmi Madrasa schools, which are not recognized by the Bangladeshi government's Education Department. The study investigated the improvements needed in Qawmi Madrasas English teaching programs to enable students to secure public university admission and Bangladeshi civil service…

Scholars have long suggested that the degree orientations of public administration programs were related to the attitudes and behaviors of students, even though empirical research had failed to confirm this relationship. The purpose of this study was to re-examine this question from the standpoint of perceptions of fit. Using a sample of…

This reflection is on a health education professional's rotation from professor in a school of public health to a government position and back parallels that of Professor Howard Koh's journey to Assistant Secretary of Health, one level higher in the same federal bureaucracy. We both acknowledge the steep learning curve and some bureaucratic…

The recession that began in December of 2007 is already 30 months old, but the U.S. economy will not recover its pre-recession employment levels for at least another two years. From there, it will take an additional three years to make up for lost growth and create a job market strong enough to employ both the casualties of the recession and the…