PUBA 747 requires students to reflect on and demonstrate how they apply and integrate their learning from five required MPA courses and their professional public service work experiences to successfully respond to an applied research problem. Students will select from a list of applied research problems, conduct a literature review, collect data, and identify their preliminary findings. These steps will be informed by their professional public service work experiences given the applied research needed to produce their thesis substitutes, which will be written and evaluated by a three-person committee during PUBA 748.

In PUBA 748, students will continue to work on their applied research problem from PUBA 747. Students are expected to enter PUBA 748 with a complete (clean) dataset, including a preliminary analysis that has been revised to include the feedback from PUBA 747 instructors. In this course, students will continue with the data analysis, discuss the findings, and develop recommendations.

This course acquaints students with the concept of productivity, its importance in the public sector, principal techniques used to improve productivity in local government, and barriers to productivity improvement initiatives.

(Online Students Only)

This course helps students hone their grant writing skills as they critique grant proposals, draft their own grant proposal, and learn about the role of program evaluation in grant writing and grant reporting.

NOTE: Students may take either PUBA 763 or 764.

This course emphasizes the practical application and implementation of various approaches to economic development. Students will apply tools/strategies by doing case studies and small group projects based on real-world scenarios faced by local practitioners.

This course provides public managers with the basic knowledge to successfully manage technology projects and government information. The use of information technology has become an indispensable part of the public sector. Governments now use technology to communicate with citizens, disseminate information, and engage in digital democracy.

This course explores the nature of city or county manager’s job: expectations of elected body, staff, public and professional peers. It examines contemporary issues in departmental operations that have significant effect on how manager’s performance is perceived.

This course examines the managerial challenges posed by nonprofit organizations and techniques and practices used by nonprofit managers to help their organizations succeed.

This course introduces a process for systematically thinking about decisions and valuable techniques for analyzing decisions. Students learn how to construct models for decision making and how to use these models to analyze decisions.

How do concepts learned in the classroom translate into real-world practice? The Carolina MPA Immersion Experience offers both online and on-campus students the opportunity to make this connection and learn from MPA faculty with expertise in government and non-profit administration. Held at the UNC School of Government, the course allows students and faculty to come together for three days to focus on a relevant topic in the field of public administration.