Courses

In this course, students will be introduced to methodological and practical issues involved in carrying out spatial analyses when planning for (and emerging from) an emergency or disaster. The course is, therefore, composed of lectures, discussions, and technical exercises pertaining to data collection, analysis, and interpretation for disaster management. Along with demonstrating the analytical capability of GIS for planning, risk, and vulnerability assessment, this course introduces students to different tools required in hazard mitigation, risk analysis, and mapping.

As a U.S. territory, Puerto Rico is a critical site for exploring public service leadership challenges and opportunities in a contemporary colonial context. This course explores leveraging leadership for resilience and success during fiscal, environmental, and social crises. This seven-day trip will require site visits with leaders in the nonprofit, philanthropic, and public sectors at organizations that provide opportunities for real-time perspective-taking and knowledge exchanges.

This course is about climate change, one of the most significant public policy challenges of the 21st century.  We will begin with the essential climate change science before exploring the public health impacts, ecological consequences, and policy responses. We will analyze adaptation measures to address storm flooding, sea level rise, heat waves, drought, and threats to biodiversity, as well as decarbonization strategies, such as renewable energy promotion.  We will evaluate local policy solutions from city governments, states, countries, to global treaties such as UN Framew

Management and Leadership is designed to empower you with the skills you will need to make meaningful change in the world—whether you care about bike lanes, criminal justice, prenatal care, community development, urban planning, social investment, or something else. Whatever your passion, you can have an impact by leading and managing. In this course, you will enhance the technical, interpersonal, conceptual, and political skills needed to run effective and efficient organizations embedded in diverse communities, policy arenas, sectors, and industries.

This half-semester course will focus on the analysis of data. We will discuss cleaning raw data – including trimming, variable transformations, and dealing with missing data – before turning to complex survey data. We will discuss how regression analysis differs when using complex survey data. Students will take real data and produce a cleaned version, as well as perform simple analyses using multiple regression. One key skill you will learn in this class is Stata, a commonly used statistics package.

International development assistance has evolved considerably in the post WWII period. Although some of the initial development agencies are still operating and remain influential, the way they function has evolved and important new players have entered the field. This course provides an overview of contemporary debates in international development assistance with a detailed review of the major actors - multilateral, bilateral, and nongovernmental.

This course focuses on the three sets of key questions: (1) mission and vision ("What areas or activities should we be working in?"); (2) strategy and operations ("How can we perform effectively in this area?"); and (3) leadership (“What leadership skills are needed to develop and implement strategies effectively?”).  We will cover both strategy formulation ("What should our strategy be?") and strategy implementation ("What do we need to do to make this strategy work?"). 

The NYU Impact Investment Fund (NIIF) is a unique inter-disciplinary, experiential learning course that exposes students to the work of an early-stage impact investor, from crafting an investment thesis to sourcing companies, performing due diligence, and ultimately executing an investment.

The politics of immigration and immigration policy seem more critical now than ever.  Public debates about immigration have roiled nations around the world, and disagreements about how immigration should be regulated, who should have the right to migrate, what political rights immigrants should have once they cross a border, and how immigrants should participate in the economy have strained political alliances and upended norms of political discourse.  In some cases, conflicts over immigration debates have been used to justify the overhaul of political institutions.  However,

This course provides an introduction to the impact investing landscape and its evolution, players, and tools. After situating impact investing vis à vis both other forms of investing and other social change tools, we explore what makes an investment impactful - and how one would go about determining that and measuring it. Through a combination of readings, case studies, class discussion, and projects, students will gain deep insight into the perspective of the impact investor and consider how it relates to other stakeholders and to social change writ large.

This course introduces the theory and practice of institutional reform in developing and transitional countries. It reviews the evolution of international development paradigms, examining how the role, structure, and management of institutions, the public sector, and non-governmental organizations have changed in response to shifting economic and political trends, with a particular emphasis on accountability. The focus is on major institutional and managerial reforms intended to promote good governance as less developed economies liberalize and their societies democratize.

This course provides students with a rich sense of the institutional and political context within which policy is made and implemented. The course aims to give students exposure to important ongoing debates in international development and their historical context. The class will provide an overview of some of the major contemporary analytical and policy debates regarding the politics of development.

Required for doctoral students.

The goal of this course is to provide students with an introduction to advanced empirical methods. We begin by discussing a framework for causal inference and how randomized controlled trials provide a simple and powerful template for thinking about causal questions. We then develop a sequence of advanced empirical methods as alternatives to randomized trials, in settings where experiments are infeasible or not desirable. In particular we discuss regression discontinuity, matching methods, difference-in-differences and panel data, and instrumental variables.

For MPA-Health Management and Health Financial Management students. Students experience the challenges of executive leadership and strategic decision-making in a complex, multi-health system marketplace. Students will have an opportunity to integrate the knowledge and skills acquired throughout the program and apply them to a set of challenging problems in healthcare management via a strategic simulation. The technology provides students real-time feedback on processes and performance in the field.

Introduction to Public Policy covers a wide range of topics, from the norms and values informing democratic policymaking to the basics of cost-benefit and other tools of policy analysis. Though emphases will differ based on instructor strengths, all sections will address the institutional arrangements for making public policy decisions, the role of various actors-including nonprofit and private-sector professionals-in shaping policy outcomes, and the fundamentals (and limits) of analytic approaches to public policy.

This course serves as an introduction to those evaluation tools most commonly used to assess the performance of programs, services, and policies in both the public and private sectors. Topics include needs assessment; explication and assessment of program theory; implementation and process assessment; research design, measurement, and sampling for outcome and impact evaluation; and the ethics of conducting program evaluation. The focus is on critical analysis and understanding of both the underlying programs and their evaluations.

Multiple regression is the core statistical technique used by policy and finance analysts in their work. In this course, you will learn how to use and interpret this critical statistical technique. Specifically you will learn how to evaluate whether regression coefficients are biased, whether standard errors (and thus t statistics) are valid, and whether regressions used in policy and finance studies support causal arguments.

Capital is but a tool – one that can be used for many different purposes. This course critically examines the role of capital and its appurtenant power as drivers of societal outcomes, providing a framework to interrogate finance as both a locus of and an instrumentality for social change.

Couples with CAP-GP.3602.

In this core course in financial management, students will learn the fundamentals of budgeting and accounting for public, health, and nonprofit organizations. Through readings, lectures, real-world case studies, and assignments, students will gain an understanding of how to use financial information in organizational planning, implementation, control, reporting, and analysis. In addition, students will have the chance to develop their spreadsheet skills by using Excel to perform financial calculations and create financial documents.

Effective development, planning execution and communication of special projects are critical to all types of public service organizations. Service organization, health providers, nonprofits and government organizations constantly pursue new initiatives and projects to address the demands of their constantly changing environment. This course offers an introduction to the basic concepts and methods for directing projects and provides students with tools that prepare them for success as a project manager. 

Only open to students in the Executive MPA Program.

This non-credit course is an excellent opportunity for all incoming Wagner students to jump-start their academic journey relative to both the foundational content as well as the classroom experience of Wagner graduate coursework. It is required of all students who did not complete their bachelor's degree at a four-year institution in the U.S. and is open to all entering Wagner students.