Courses

This one-week travel class to Amsterdam offers an immersive journey into the heart of sustainable urbanism. The course offers a unique opportunity for students to delve deep into the city's pioneering approaches to sustainable mobility, climate adaptation, and urban tech.

This is an advanced course for students who plan to become policy analysts.  Students (a) extend their familiarity with methodologic issues, including research designs, measurement problems, and analytic approaches; (b) get hands-on experience with management, analysis, and presentation of data; and (c) develop skills in reading, critiquing, and reporting on policy-relevant research.

This course addresses the macro and micro effects of gender in the workplace, from the complicated reasons for the lack of representation of women in senior leadership across sectors to the dynamics of individuals of various genders working together. The landscape of the workplace has changed dramatically over the last few decades, and with a shift towards a more diverse and global workforce, understanding the intersection of work dynamics and gender is critical.

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?"). 

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Couples with CAP-GP.3602.

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.

Couples with CAP-GP.3302

As part of the core curriculum of the NYU Wagner Masters program, Capstone teams spend an academic year addressing challenges and identifying opportunities for a client organization or working on a pre-approved, team-generated project in which they develop a business case or prototype to create social impact or launch a social enterprise.

This workshop provides participants with the fundamental steps of how to plan and implement transformation initiatives using the PMP methodology and best practices. Project Management forms the basis for effectively delivering improvements to business processes, deploying new technologies, transformation using data and metrics and communicating change management.

This course introduces students to basic statistical methods and their application to management, policy, and financial decision-making. The course covers the essential elements of descriptive statistics, univariate and bivariate statistical inference, and introduces multivariate analysis. In addition to covering statistical theory the course emphasizes applied statistics and data analysis, using the software package, Stata.

Couples with CAP-GP.3149.