Penn I-MPA students do intensive and exciting coursework in three capacities: as individuals, as members of a Leadership Task Group (LTG), and as collaborators in class-wide exercises and projects.
Each LTG functions throughout the year and across the nine-course (ten c.u.) curriculum as a small-group shared learning community.
The I-MPA program’s curricular structure
One course (I-MPA 6010) that focuses on critical issues in governance and human well-being; another course (I-MPA 6040) that immerses students in the latest and best interdisciplinary thinking about cross-sector (government, business, and nonprofit) collaboration; and a third course (I-MPA 6060) that surveys competing theories and concepts concerning leadership ethics.
Four courses, each of which imparts academically well-grounded but practical and applied lessons in leadership and problem-solving—economic reasoning for public decision-making (I-MPA 6020); quantitative reasoning for public decision-making (I-MPA 6030); leadership theory and practice (I-MPA 6050); and leadership and global public health (I-MPA 6080).
Two courses, one of which counts as two course units toward the ten course units required for graduation, and each of which challenges students to independently apply the curriculum's core theories, key concepts, evidence-based techniques, and illustrative case studies: a group-organized, class-wide capstone project on global aging in which students, guided by leading experts, immerse themselves in issues pertaining to the "eldercare crisis" in Southwest and East Asia, and evaluate public-private programs that serve the most vulnerable older subpopulations in several Chinese cities (I-MPA 6095, two course units); and a highly structured but individually researched and written biographical analysis of a consequential global leader (I-MPA 6100).
The Nine I-MPA courses
5 Fall Semester Courses
Over the last 200 years, despite wars, famines, and plagues, human beings in virtually every corner of the globe have become more likely to live longer, healthier, wealthier, and better overall. But global progress in human well-being has been neither linear nor universal. Moreover, humankind now faces several unprecedented existential threats to human life itself, including nuclear weapons proliferation, global warming, and the persistence or spread of drug-resistant infectious diseases including ones once thought to be nearly eradicated. What must happen if the next century-long chapter in the annals of global human well-being—the chapter to be written between now and the year 2024—is to be a tale of greater health, wealth, and happiness for all or most people worldwide, including not just we the living but billions of people yet to be born?
There are no simple ways to answer that complicated question, but our faculty believes that two necessary but insufficient conditions for improving global human well-being are (1) to improve "governance"—public-private partnerships and cross-sector (government, business, and nonprofit) collaboration—within and across nations; and (2) to better harmonize the "built environment"—the human-crafted settings for human activity ranging from buildings, roads, and parks to energy grids, neighborhoods, and cityscapes—with what promotes human health, safety, happiness, peace, and prosperity.
Through lectures, readings, group discussions, and illustrative case studies, students in this course explore ten evidence-based ideas about how diverse governments can promote better governance through boundary-spanning, "bridge-building" leadership, and the latest and best empirical research regarding how governments, businesses, and nonprofit organizations can design and build "healthy places" that are sustainably conducive to human well-being.
This course introduces students to key concepts such as scarcity, efficiency, and monopolies. In addition, it examines how efficiency is affected by distortions relevant to public policy, especially regulations, externalities, and incomplete information. From the macroeconomics side, we cover a variety of timely and timeless topics including the short-run and long-run effects of government and debt. Students practice applying these concepts to the range of decisions that public sector leaders have to make in order to understand the trade-offs inherent in any public policy or program.
Many government, business, and nonprofit leaders around the globe are drowning in numerical and statistical data. The challenge they face is not only how to organize, parse, and analyze the data, but also how to utilize it effectively and in real time to cope with adverse conditions, solve problems, and achieve desirable outcomes. This course is uniquely designed to enhance your ability to use data effectively for real-time problem-identification, definition, decision-making, and problem-solving. In this course, students are introduced to key concepts, principles, protocols, and analytical tools and techniques relevant to quantitative reasoning, statistical analysis, and three separate but related problem-solving leadership skills: (1) forecasting general social, economic, and civic trends; (2) measuring performance and results; and (3) evaluating particular social, economic, and civic interventions or programs. Students learn and apply these skills in relation to several cases.
Leaders across the world increasingly recognize the necessity of working across boundaries through various forms of collaboration. Collaboration across the government, nonprofit and business sectors has become more prevalent and important, but, at the same time, also more complicated. This course helps students understand the theory, policy, and practice of cross-sector collaboration. Students learn the purposes collaborations may serve, the forms they take, what skills and techniques are required, and the steps involved in initiating, sustaining, and evolving them. Students also learn the characteristics of the three sectors, the roles and contributions each can make to successful collaborations, and the competitive forces that are often at work in the collaborative process—as well as their possible implications.
Global leaders must work across three different types of boundaries: interpersonal boundaries, which involve relations with people who differ from oneself demographically, personality-wise, and otherwise; institutional boundaries, which involve working across government, nonprofit, and business organizations; and international boundaries, which involves both individual and institutional engagements that are carried on across national borders. This course introduces students to the latest and best empirical research literature on leadership. Students explore how to identify one’s own leadership-relevant traits, skills, and signature strengths, and how to learn from past and present global leaders whose careers arguably exemplify ethical and effective boundary-spanning leadership.
4 Spring Semester Courses
In a world filled with multiple and competing human well-being needs, not all of which can be addressed or acted upon fully or at once, which human well-being goals or purposes ought to matter most, which problems ought to be considered most deserving of attention and action, and which goals, purposes, or problems should be treated as top priorities with respect to their claims on attention, resources, and action? Under what, if any, conditions, should accomplishing certain human well-being ends be thought to justify policy or programmatic means that involve largely or wholly sacrificing other goals, purposes, or human well-being ideals and interests in the bargain?
Students explore how, whether, and to what extent effective boundary-spanning leadership is, ought to be, or can be made synonymous with moral or ethical boundary-spanning leadership, and by which understanding(s) of “morality” and “ethics.” Through classic and contemporary readings and case studies, students study several different philosophical and religious writings and traditions that might usefully inform the moral reasoning of present or future leaders who seek to promote human well-being by solving local, regional, national, or global problems.
This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and addressing contemporary global public health challenges and problems in developing countries. Through lectures, readings, case studies, and group discussions, students learn and apply such concepts or techniques as the measure of disease burden, health and human rights, health economics, and cost-benefit analysis. The main case study concerns certain acute public health problems in Africa. Globally, more than half of all children under age five who die of pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria reside in Africa. More generally, by many public health indices, including rates of life-threatening infectious diseases, access to healthcare delivery, life expectancy, and rates of foodborne illnesses, Africa faces huge and still largely unmet public health challenges. Millions of people In Africa die each year from diseases that can be prevented by access to certain medicines and mitigated by participation in particular programs. Focusing mainly on malaria in Africa, and with a special case-based focus on Tanzania, students describe, analyze, and evaluate multiple and competing anti-malaria approaches and programmatic initiatives.
Note: This two course-unit course meets once a week for lecture and twice a week for recitations.
Note: This two course-unit course fulfills one of two capstone requirements.
Program evaluation involves two separate but related skills: forecasting general social, economic, and civic trends; and evaluating particular social, economic, and civic programs. In this course, students learn key program evaluation concepts, principles, and techniques and then apply them in problem-solving exercises related to global aging with a focus on Asia. The elderly population of Asia is projected to exceed 900 million by the year 2050. In East and Southwest Asia, public health policies are just beginning to support "healthy aging in place," and pension systems are not yet well-developed. In this expert-led, group-organized, and class-wide capstone course, students learn about global aging and explore the humanitarian, economic and public health dilemmas posed by eldercare in East and Southwest Asia. By 2040, China alone is projected to have more than 400 million people age 60 or older. Students do individual and task group projects regarding how leading Chinese governmental bodies, ranging from national, provincial, and district-level ministries to the Chinese Communist Party, have defined the eldercare challenge; promoted "public-private partnerships" (or "PPP") programs; advanced community-based "healthy aging in place”; addressed the need for more geriatric medical practitioners and nursing professionals; and more. The last segment of the course is a multi-week research and writing project in which students describe, analyze, and assess China's subpopulation of "three needs" elderly citizens, and identify, evaluate, and prescribe reforms to existing PPP eldercare programs. The course concludes with a student-led presentation of the class's capstone report before a distinguished, multilingual, and multinational group of experts and leaders from the worlds of government, business, and the nonprofit sector.
Note: This one course-unit hybrid course fulfills one of two capstone requirements.
Global leaders must work across three different types of boundaries: interpersonal boundaries, which involve relations with persons who differ from oneself demographically and in other ways; institutional boundaries, which involves working across government, nonprofit, and business organizations; and international boundaries, which involves both individual and institutional engagements that are carried on across national borders. In this hybrid capstone course, each student learns the latest and best empirical research literature on leadership; explores how to identify one's own leadership-relevant traits, skills, and signature strengths; and conducts a study of a past or present-day global leader whose career holds general lessons about what is necessary to be an ethical and effective boundary-spanning leader. Working quasi-independently with an assigned I-MPA advisor, each student produces a ten-point "Mini-Biographical Analysis" (M-BA) of a single significant global public leader. The M-BA is conducted as an advanced research and writing project that results in a paper that is deemed by the I-MPA faculty to be within the realm of professional if not publishable quality.
