I wrote earlier this year for Huffington Post (UK) about the differences between the UK and USA when it comes to Universities and Public Policy – in exactly the opposite way most would suppose.  Whilst the more government-sceptic USA has lots of activity in Universities, the UK is notably weak – at least when it comes to organising public policy activity. I’ve been doing a bit more research and here are some of the findings.

‘Public policy’, under various labels[i], tends to be a major fixture in most prominent Universities internationally – well known examples include the Kennedy School at Harvard or the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.

Of the top 25 universities globally (2010), 19 have institutes or schools of public policy and if the 3 ‘technological’ universities are excluded 19 of the 22 ‘generalist’ universities have such institutes and 16 run Masters of Public Administration (MPA) or Masters of Public Policy (MPP) programmes, or both.

Many of the 19 US universities also run ‘offices of public affairs’ that organise the institutions engagement with its local, regional and national governments.

In many places outside the USA too big efforts are being made to expand public policy HE provision:

• the Australian commonwealth government has just given ANU’s Crawford School A$110m to improve their public policy offer and become “the Kennedy School for the Asia-Pacific” (as one colleague at ANU put it to me).

• PR China has launched over 70 MPA programmes in the past 10 years

• Several regional groupings of public policy institutes have been launched in the over recent decades including NAPSIPAG[ii] (Asia-Pacific, 2004) and NISPACee (Central and Eastern Europe, 1995), CLAD (Latin America, 1972)

• MPA programmes globally have more than doubled from about 250 two decades ago to more the 500 today[iii]

The UK has been slow to respond to this global trend. we have few Schools of Public Policy or many MPA/MPP[iv] programmes, although the latter at least are expanding.

This may be set to change with Oxford launching the Blavatnik School of Government (with £100m plus investment). Cambridge is already reviewing their offer in the field and others may follow this lead. And the establishment of 15 or so MPA programmes in the UK (mostly recruiting internationally) over the past decade signifies a substantial shift.

The picture for Public Policy at the world’s top 25 Universities (as ranked by the influential Academic Ranking of World Universities) is set out in the table below.

Public Policy at the Top 25 (2010) Universities Globally