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Editorial: Should the Wilson School certificate program be selective?
Published: Monday, March 1st, 2010
Two weeks ago, nearly 200 sophomores applied for 90 available spots in the Wilson School, including a small, dedicated number of students applying for the Wilson School certificate program. Selectivity in academic programs should be avoided whenever possible. Students who ...
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Let’s not forget the third option: abolishing the Wilson School as an undergraduate major altogether. As has apparently been recognized by our peer schools — few of which offer any undergraduate public policy majors (e.g., no undergraduate degrees at Harvard’s Kennedy School) — offering an undergraduate degree in policy analysis doesn’t really make a great deal of sense. Policy analysis is about applying various social science disciplines in order to analyze some problem and (hopefully) develop recommendations to address it. But how can third- and fourth-year college students be doing serious policy analysis when they haven’t yet had time to develop much background in any other discipline?
It’s one thing when you bring together a group of graduate students of varied backgrounds, each of whom has at least four years of academic training in some substantive discipline (and often brings other experience to the table as well), and have them bring their different skills to bear in collectively analyzing some problem. But regrettably, few if any undergraduate students in the Wilson School have an extensive background in these other fields yet — and yet task forces are still being pressed to conduct rudimentary statistical analyses and such, even without a deep background in statistics, because that’s what policy task forces are expected to do. The end result is often a bunch of flimsy reports which are flawed by improper statistical inferences, superficial political or sociological analysis that lacks any real depth, etc. That’s not to say this is the students’ fault — what else can you expect them to do with the limited knowledge that they have? — but it’s hardly the elite education that you’d expect from the Wilson School. (On the other hand, perhaps it’s the perfect background for McKinsey/Bain/etc consulting jobs: students learn to write reports that *sound* smart and impressive, regardless of whether the underlying analysis is sound or not.)
I’ve been told by numerous faculty members and even a dean that if it were up to a vote of the Wilson School faculty, WWS would not be open to undergraduate students at all. The only reason that the undergraduate major remains is that the University’s top-level administrators realize how much of Princeton’s appeal to prospective students comes from our undergraduate focus, and having a graduate school without any undergraduate majors would destroy that image. It’s certainly understandable how we got in this mess, but it does a real disservice to the University and to all of these students when we’re clinging to a broken program — indeed, even parading it as the University’s one “exclusive” major — purely for reasons of image.
Alum '06 makes some good points but let's not forget that some of our most distinguished public service alums have come out of the undergraduate Wilson School program.
@WWS grad alum
What's the counterfactual? If the undergrad program is abolished and these same alums concentrate in econ, political science, history, or sociology instead, with only the opportunity to take public policy classes instead of concentrate in WWS, do we think that they would become less successful later on? Certainly our peer institutions -- none of whom have an undergrad public admin / policy school -- also have prominent alums in public service.
@GS
Of course we cannot know for sure how outcomes would be different in an alternate scenario. My own experience was that the undergrad WWS students added to the fabric of the school and that many professors enjoyed teaching them in that setting.
@ alum '06
Just because no other schools offers a public policy undergraduate major doesn't mean it's a bad idea to do so. If Harvard by your token does everything right, maybe you went to the wrong undergrad college.
To assume that undergraduates who major in econ/pol/whatever bring 4 years of training to the table is hopefully a jk. As you know, the prerequisites that must be fulfilled for most majors are very lax, and even junior and senior year there are few required courses and many possible combinations of electives. Even the thesis can be written in many ways in a single discipline. Real academic rigor doesn't come until grad school. So maybe graduate students who do public policy are perhaps the ones who will end up doing rudimentary statistics, whereas the WWS majors will bring a public policy perspective to their future academic field.
Look, based on Alum 06's reasoning, we shouldn't have an undergrad econ major either? Can undergrads really have reason through complex economic problems which require years of experience?
The point is, you need to start somewhere, and that somewhere is an undergrad program.
The lack of an undergrad program at peer schools, moreover, does not mean that they don't value them. What kind of argument is that? There are hundreds of majors that we don't have that our peer schools do-- and yet nobody is saying that they're worthless. Let's extend that logic even further-- do no undergrad schools in the United States value law or medicine because they don't offer those programs while our counterparts in almost every other country do at the undergrad level?
Wilson School majors pursue public service careers at a rate much higher than any other major. Let's look at the proportion of English, Sociology, History, Politics, or Econ majors who are or have been the leaders of our country. If you look at Princeton alums who do go on to become national leaders, they are of course disproportionately WWS.
So, it's easy to find WWS majors who don't go into public service immediately after graduation-- but anecdotes are not useful for constructing the bigger picture. If 45% of WWS goes into public service (govt, think tank, nonprofit, etc), whereas 15% of Princeton does, it's misleading to accuse WWS people of not going into public service more.
Look at the math department, for example. Are we going to accuse the math department of not getting people to go into the academia and pure math just because over half of the department becomes quants and traders on Wall St.?
the difference is that math majors dont strut around spewing self-righteous bs about how theyre going to go into academia and pure math