Their holders do not understand how government works, but it does not have to be that way. A proper government program would send brilliant minds into government the way computer science programs have them headed into tech.
What might you be able to learn from international models here? Presumably the French "enarques" who went to the Ecole nationale de l'administration (now the INSP, says Wikipedia) got an education much more like what you're proposing. What has worked well about that and what hasn't? Of the differences between your plan and the ENA/INSP curriculum, which were due to systemic differences between France and the US and which due to differences of pedagogical approach? France also has a famous university literally called "Sciences Po"-- what are the curricular differences between that and the ENA and are there any lessons to be learned from that?
Or take the vaunted supercompetent, highly paid officials of Singapore. Where do they go to school and what do they learn there?
I'm working on digging into these things, although admittedly my progress has been slow outside of looking at the non-American anglosphere (where it seems like training programs are similar).
One principal difference between my work and the international models: I'm primarily concerned with training people for work at the sub-national level--in NYC and NYS, and getting more talent into states generally. ENA seems to mostly send people to the national level in France, and Singapore's training sends them right into the city-state's national government.
Another principal difference: America's federal system is sufficiently distinct from these other countries that a lot of my program inherently has different material. For example, France has a civil law system, and the US has a British-descended common law system. These set up different relationships between statutory/administrative and case law, bureaucrats and judges.
This is really interesting to hear especially about the lack of a structured curriculum, absence of specific starting points and goals, and the general lack of technical fluency in existing programs. I was an undergrad finance major and there were several pre-requisites and general business class requirements that made it feel like a step wise function, where you build on what you learned before.
If there was a general mechanics class, what kind of impact do you hope to achieve through the proposed shift? Would that be an enticing business case for these universities to adapt a different curriculum?
I'd expect to see a wide variety of effects from teaching actual governmental mechanics:
1) More students would directly pursue work in government out of college, especially at the state level, relative to current levels.
2) Students would be more interested in government, because they would actually know what it is. It's tough to pursue a subject in deep technical depth if no one helps you hone that technical craft--very few will be autodidacts.
3) The level of concreteness in political discussions, and in social norms, would increase.
4) Students would be less pessimistic about politics and government, and many more would flip to being optimistic, which would have many positive spillover effects. Since most students don't even know what government concretely is, or what its history is, they easily buy into "it's all broken and we're all going down" rhetoric. But I've seen so many people become optimistic once the learn how things really work (kinda the Bryant Park bathroom phenomenon). Our cities, states, and nation have come very far, overcome much, and have shown adaptability that would shock most people if they only knew.
Huh, until this essay I did not realize how freeform a political science degree could be. For contrast, my CS degree involved at least eight classes that every major had to take, with expected progression between them.
Do you think part of the reason for this is an expectation that students already have knowledge about the government from before college? Or is it really just that no one seems to think it's important knowledge to have?
1) I don't think professors really expect undergrads to know this stuff--their courses and syllabi often don't require people to know much governmental mechanics. Of course, the consequence is that each student in "The Comparative Politics of US and Latin America" (or whatever) will read a lot of abstract theory, but not *actually* understand what they're reading in a concrete way. Or students will read pieces comparing the presidential system to parliamentary systems, but will never get into the actual practice of those two systems. For example--how do rule making and administrative law work under a prime minister? Is it different than a president?
2) I think people do understand that governmental mechanics is important on some level, but most people (in gov, in academia) continue to radically overestimate how many people actually understand the government in reasonable detail. I think we have an actual, acute shortage of governmental mechanics experts who can teach, so in many ways the current university system *can't* teach this stuff.
Oct 13, 2023·edited Oct 13, 2023Liked by Daniel Golliher
Hear hear! I got a political science degree (a BS in political BS) at a big state school with the intention of going into government with aims to do well to my community. By junior year it became evident that this was not what a polisci degree is useful for, however, having already started late after switching majors and "pathfinding" (humanities minor), I decided to stick it out so I can graduate college on time. Currently I work in finance due to a lucky break. What others from my class are doing with their time I'm not quite certain, but the few I do keep in touch with are not in government, nor policy making positions. My schooling was a wasted opportunity that some people go into debt for. Guidance was virtually non-existent. Knowledge I currently have about government and international relations was gleaned afterwards through personal study. It was not until much later that I discovered that the US Foreign Service existed. As a student, I thought diplomats were a political appointment made through social and wealthy connections, not a career path with a ladder.
Time is limited. Education should be intentional and rigorous so students can benefit with practical knowledge and thereby benefit society. What we have, what you described, is the opposite.
I'm unsure how I stumbled upon your essay, but it struck home. Thank you. To some degree I harbor insecurities of always being on the back foot, having to be an autodidact in both finance and politics, never having a formal education an either. Every student that goes through polisci is done a disservice, and at my university, it was one of the popular degrees given its location in the state capitol.
You're not alone, and I'm glad you found the essay. Government is one of the more popular degrees at Harvard as well, and each student there is done a similar disservice.
If you ever want to join my project to change university degrees in any capacity, you'd be most welcome!
A clarifying question: are course prerequisites common in government / political science degrees?
In my computer science degree at Princeton there was a decent amount of flexibility in the later years, but the first and second year were heavily structured around a set of courses that were prerequisites for later courses. Essentially all courses had Intro to Computer Science as a prerequisite (the course enrolment system wouldn’t let you enrol without have passed or placed out of the intro class). Then there were two intermediate classes that basically everyone did in sophomore year on algorithms and computer systems. Then there was more freedom, but still typically a 400-level class in topic X required you to have done the 300-level class in something similar, which in turn required those three intro classes. This meant that we were all building off a similar pool of knowledge and techniques.
They aren't that common, although they do exist. Students can often get permission to skip the prereqs though, and I think it's usually unwise to allow this.
For example, Harvard's government degree only has one specifically required course that all majors must take--otherwise it's closer to a free for all.
But I do think governmental mechanics can be taught with a proper order of precedence, and that there *is* a proper order of precedence.
Wouldn't the Kennedy School provide a relevant point of comparison, analogously to the relationship between the Harvard Economics department and the Harvard Business School?
Could you say a bit more about the question? I'm a bit unclear about what you mean. For example, is the question like: "HKS provides a program in governmental mechanics, and if you want to learn that you can go there after a poli sci undergrad degree, in the same way that you'd learn more applied things from an undergrad ec degree at HBS."
Oct 16, 2023·edited Oct 16, 2023Liked by Daniel Golliher
Not sure if that’s what SlowlyReading had in mind, but I’d like to hear your answer to the question! As in, whether you think any of the degree programs at HKS teach governmental mechanics, in part because HKS seems to be more specifically oriented towards preparing students for non-academic professions.
And if the undergraduate vs graduate distinction is important here, I’d also like to know your assessment of whether undergraduate public policy degree programs at other universities teach governmental mechanics.
As far as I can tell, the landscape looks like this:
I don't think HKS teaches governmental mechanics; I think students bring the real-world knowledge they have (whatever amount that is), and branch off from that, rather than entering into a standard degree program that will guarantee you understand the governmental system as a whole. Having spoken to people who've attended, seen it on the ground when I was in Cambridge, etc, it seems to be very similar to the undergrad polisci degree in important respects. It's too "flexible," with no specific requirements. The idea is that each student creates their own course of study based on their interests; while this can be useful, of course, it also means people commit the error of going off into very specialized parts of government without backing out to see if they understand the whole. Here're the HKS MPA degree requirements: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/educational-programs/masters-programs/master-public-administration/degree-requirements
I'm sure there are exceptions to this (I know there are), but HKS is more similar to a la carte self-study than a rigorous training in, say, how federal administration works.
As far as the undergrad v grad distinction: it seems like undergrad public policy degrees are better (Pace University near City Hall might be an outlier with their MPA, but I'm not done digging into that). They have a more standardized curricula that covers things like procurement, stakeholder management, etc. But, with that said: I've talked with people who've gone through these programs and gotten jobs with the city/state, and then they promptly stop learning about the wider government. They can tell you everything about how Parks does procurement, but...that's it. They don't really know how the legislative process works beyond a certain point, they don't know the players, they don't know how the other levels of gov interact with theirs, etc, and their programs didn't teach them.
And, even though undergrad public policy programs seem to get into more concrete governmental mechanics, program quality still varies quite a bit. For example, George Washington University has a political science degree with a public policy focus, and its just the standard a la carte polisci degree + a few more electives (https://politicalscience.columbian.gwu.edu/ba-political-science-public-policy-focus).
Thanks! What I’m getting from this is that students who do learn concrete details about the government (whether from an a la carte program or a standardized one) are generally unable and/or unwilling to comprehensively understand how the government works.
1) Why do you think students are unable to generalize? There’s an ethos common in liberal arts education that it isn’t supposed to teach students what to learn but how to learn, and that once students learn a particular skill through some specific examples (e.g. engaging with the concrete details of one aspect of one government), they can apply that skill to new situations. Why do you think that that doesn’t happen for government mechanics?
2) Why do you think people who have gone through these programs don’t try to generalize their knowledge? What do you think professionals in government and politics would be able to do better if they had a comprehensive understanding of the concrete details of the government? I understand how in principle, learning something comprehensively allows one to contextualize one’s work, but in practice I imagine people’s work does focus on a couple of particular areas. If someone works on procurement for Parks, I can see how learning how another NYC government agency does procurement or how a different city’s Parks department does procurement could help them, but I could see why they might think that learning the structure of the government is more of an intellectual exercise than something that gives them tangible benefits.
1) I think there's a lot of things going on here. Two of them would be: (A) once people get into jobs, they just become focused on doing the day-to-day work of the job. When they clock out, they don't really want to dedicate time to learning. Since there really aren't great places to make that learning easy, people just don't. This pattern then persists. (B) I don't think many students learn enough concrete details, and the methods to process them, to achieve "autodidact escape velocity," which is what the liberal arts purport to give people, but don't. If you want to learn an instrument, you need to encounter it quite a lot, beyond which point you can start playing on your own and improvising easily. Same with many other things. But modern liberal arts programs rarely give students enough good instruction.
2) A lot of things are similar to ^^ above. Part of the reason is just "humans with jobs" pressures, part of it is they aren't actually sufficiently equipped to generalize well, which requires instruction in both concretes *and* methods.
In the first instance, government employees could more effectively communicate what they know to others who could use that information. But this requires first knowing what other parts of the government there are. Or: Learning more about government means knowing "who are the people, what do they do, what is the law" quite broadly; it means you can see (or investigate) which parts of the system aren't getting information that you have.
In the essay, I link to Santi Ruiz's newsletter where he discusses how academics--who are not trained in the realities of government and policymaking--can't communicate their useful knowledge to the government. I think this can also happen to government employees who don't understand the government well--the good knowledge they have is also withheld from decision makers.
What might you be able to learn from international models here? Presumably the French "enarques" who went to the Ecole nationale de l'administration (now the INSP, says Wikipedia) got an education much more like what you're proposing. What has worked well about that and what hasn't? Of the differences between your plan and the ENA/INSP curriculum, which were due to systemic differences between France and the US and which due to differences of pedagogical approach? France also has a famous university literally called "Sciences Po"-- what are the curricular differences between that and the ENA and are there any lessons to be learned from that?
Or take the vaunted supercompetent, highly paid officials of Singapore. Where do they go to school and what do they learn there?
I'm working on digging into these things, although admittedly my progress has been slow outside of looking at the non-American anglosphere (where it seems like training programs are similar).
One principal difference between my work and the international models: I'm primarily concerned with training people for work at the sub-national level--in NYC and NYS, and getting more talent into states generally. ENA seems to mostly send people to the national level in France, and Singapore's training sends them right into the city-state's national government.
Another principal difference: America's federal system is sufficiently distinct from these other countries that a lot of my program inherently has different material. For example, France has a civil law system, and the US has a British-descended common law system. These set up different relationships between statutory/administrative and case law, bureaucrats and judges.
If you have any pointers, send them my way!
This is really interesting to hear especially about the lack of a structured curriculum, absence of specific starting points and goals, and the general lack of technical fluency in existing programs. I was an undergrad finance major and there were several pre-requisites and general business class requirements that made it feel like a step wise function, where you build on what you learned before.
If there was a general mechanics class, what kind of impact do you hope to achieve through the proposed shift? Would that be an enticing business case for these universities to adapt a different curriculum?
I'd expect to see a wide variety of effects from teaching actual governmental mechanics:
1) More students would directly pursue work in government out of college, especially at the state level, relative to current levels.
2) Students would be more interested in government, because they would actually know what it is. It's tough to pursue a subject in deep technical depth if no one helps you hone that technical craft--very few will be autodidacts.
3) The level of concreteness in political discussions, and in social norms, would increase.
4) Students would be less pessimistic about politics and government, and many more would flip to being optimistic, which would have many positive spillover effects. Since most students don't even know what government concretely is, or what its history is, they easily buy into "it's all broken and we're all going down" rhetoric. But I've seen so many people become optimistic once the learn how things really work (kinda the Bryant Park bathroom phenomenon). Our cities, states, and nation have come very far, overcome much, and have shown adaptability that would shock most people if they only knew.
Huh, until this essay I did not realize how freeform a political science degree could be. For contrast, my CS degree involved at least eight classes that every major had to take, with expected progression between them.
Do you think part of the reason for this is an expectation that students already have knowledge about the government from before college? Or is it really just that no one seems to think it's important knowledge to have?
I think it's a mix of things:
1) I don't think professors really expect undergrads to know this stuff--their courses and syllabi often don't require people to know much governmental mechanics. Of course, the consequence is that each student in "The Comparative Politics of US and Latin America" (or whatever) will read a lot of abstract theory, but not *actually* understand what they're reading in a concrete way. Or students will read pieces comparing the presidential system to parliamentary systems, but will never get into the actual practice of those two systems. For example--how do rule making and administrative law work under a prime minister? Is it different than a president?
2) I think people do understand that governmental mechanics is important on some level, but most people (in gov, in academia) continue to radically overestimate how many people actually understand the government in reasonable detail. I think we have an actual, acute shortage of governmental mechanics experts who can teach, so in many ways the current university system *can't* teach this stuff.
Hear hear! I got a political science degree (a BS in political BS) at a big state school with the intention of going into government with aims to do well to my community. By junior year it became evident that this was not what a polisci degree is useful for, however, having already started late after switching majors and "pathfinding" (humanities minor), I decided to stick it out so I can graduate college on time. Currently I work in finance due to a lucky break. What others from my class are doing with their time I'm not quite certain, but the few I do keep in touch with are not in government, nor policy making positions. My schooling was a wasted opportunity that some people go into debt for. Guidance was virtually non-existent. Knowledge I currently have about government and international relations was gleaned afterwards through personal study. It was not until much later that I discovered that the US Foreign Service existed. As a student, I thought diplomats were a political appointment made through social and wealthy connections, not a career path with a ladder.
Time is limited. Education should be intentional and rigorous so students can benefit with practical knowledge and thereby benefit society. What we have, what you described, is the opposite.
I'm unsure how I stumbled upon your essay, but it struck home. Thank you. To some degree I harbor insecurities of always being on the back foot, having to be an autodidact in both finance and politics, never having a formal education an either. Every student that goes through polisci is done a disservice, and at my university, it was one of the popular degrees given its location in the state capitol.
You're not alone, and I'm glad you found the essay. Government is one of the more popular degrees at Harvard as well, and each student there is done a similar disservice.
If you ever want to join my project to change university degrees in any capacity, you'd be most welcome!
Interesting to learn more about this mess!
A clarifying question: are course prerequisites common in government / political science degrees?
In my computer science degree at Princeton there was a decent amount of flexibility in the later years, but the first and second year were heavily structured around a set of courses that were prerequisites for later courses. Essentially all courses had Intro to Computer Science as a prerequisite (the course enrolment system wouldn’t let you enrol without have passed or placed out of the intro class). Then there were two intermediate classes that basically everyone did in sophomore year on algorithms and computer systems. Then there was more freedom, but still typically a 400-level class in topic X required you to have done the 300-level class in something similar, which in turn required those three intro classes. This meant that we were all building off a similar pool of knowledge and techniques.
They aren't that common, although they do exist. Students can often get permission to skip the prereqs though, and I think it's usually unwise to allow this.
For example, Harvard's government degree only has one specifically required course that all majors must take--otherwise it's closer to a free for all.
But I do think governmental mechanics can be taught with a proper order of precedence, and that there *is* a proper order of precedence.
Wouldn't the Kennedy School provide a relevant point of comparison, analogously to the relationship between the Harvard Economics department and the Harvard Business School?
Could you say a bit more about the question? I'm a bit unclear about what you mean. For example, is the question like: "HKS provides a program in governmental mechanics, and if you want to learn that you can go there after a poli sci undergrad degree, in the same way that you'd learn more applied things from an undergrad ec degree at HBS."
Not sure if that’s what SlowlyReading had in mind, but I’d like to hear your answer to the question! As in, whether you think any of the degree programs at HKS teach governmental mechanics, in part because HKS seems to be more specifically oriented towards preparing students for non-academic professions.
And if the undergraduate vs graduate distinction is important here, I’d also like to know your assessment of whether undergraduate public policy degree programs at other universities teach governmental mechanics.
As far as I can tell, the landscape looks like this:
I don't think HKS teaches governmental mechanics; I think students bring the real-world knowledge they have (whatever amount that is), and branch off from that, rather than entering into a standard degree program that will guarantee you understand the governmental system as a whole. Having spoken to people who've attended, seen it on the ground when I was in Cambridge, etc, it seems to be very similar to the undergrad polisci degree in important respects. It's too "flexible," with no specific requirements. The idea is that each student creates their own course of study based on their interests; while this can be useful, of course, it also means people commit the error of going off into very specialized parts of government without backing out to see if they understand the whole. Here're the HKS MPA degree requirements: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/educational-programs/masters-programs/master-public-administration/degree-requirements
I'm sure there are exceptions to this (I know there are), but HKS is more similar to a la carte self-study than a rigorous training in, say, how federal administration works.
As far as the undergrad v grad distinction: it seems like undergrad public policy degrees are better (Pace University near City Hall might be an outlier with their MPA, but I'm not done digging into that). They have a more standardized curricula that covers things like procurement, stakeholder management, etc. But, with that said: I've talked with people who've gone through these programs and gotten jobs with the city/state, and then they promptly stop learning about the wider government. They can tell you everything about how Parks does procurement, but...that's it. They don't really know how the legislative process works beyond a certain point, they don't know the players, they don't know how the other levels of gov interact with theirs, etc, and their programs didn't teach them.
And, even though undergrad public policy programs seem to get into more concrete governmental mechanics, program quality still varies quite a bit. For example, George Washington University has a political science degree with a public policy focus, and its just the standard a la carte polisci degree + a few more electives (https://politicalscience.columbian.gwu.edu/ba-political-science-public-policy-focus).
Thanks! What I’m getting from this is that students who do learn concrete details about the government (whether from an a la carte program or a standardized one) are generally unable and/or unwilling to comprehensively understand how the government works.
1) Why do you think students are unable to generalize? There’s an ethos common in liberal arts education that it isn’t supposed to teach students what to learn but how to learn, and that once students learn a particular skill through some specific examples (e.g. engaging with the concrete details of one aspect of one government), they can apply that skill to new situations. Why do you think that that doesn’t happen for government mechanics?
2) Why do you think people who have gone through these programs don’t try to generalize their knowledge? What do you think professionals in government and politics would be able to do better if they had a comprehensive understanding of the concrete details of the government? I understand how in principle, learning something comprehensively allows one to contextualize one’s work, but in practice I imagine people’s work does focus on a couple of particular areas. If someone works on procurement for Parks, I can see how learning how another NYC government agency does procurement or how a different city’s Parks department does procurement could help them, but I could see why they might think that learning the structure of the government is more of an intellectual exercise than something that gives them tangible benefits.
1) I think there's a lot of things going on here. Two of them would be: (A) once people get into jobs, they just become focused on doing the day-to-day work of the job. When they clock out, they don't really want to dedicate time to learning. Since there really aren't great places to make that learning easy, people just don't. This pattern then persists. (B) I don't think many students learn enough concrete details, and the methods to process them, to achieve "autodidact escape velocity," which is what the liberal arts purport to give people, but don't. If you want to learn an instrument, you need to encounter it quite a lot, beyond which point you can start playing on your own and improvising easily. Same with many other things. But modern liberal arts programs rarely give students enough good instruction.
2) A lot of things are similar to ^^ above. Part of the reason is just "humans with jobs" pressures, part of it is they aren't actually sufficiently equipped to generalize well, which requires instruction in both concretes *and* methods.
In the first instance, government employees could more effectively communicate what they know to others who could use that information. But this requires first knowing what other parts of the government there are. Or: Learning more about government means knowing "who are the people, what do they do, what is the law" quite broadly; it means you can see (or investigate) which parts of the system aren't getting information that you have.
In the essay, I link to Santi Ruiz's newsletter where he discusses how academics--who are not trained in the realities of government and policymaking--can't communicate their useful knowledge to the government. I think this can also happen to government employees who don't understand the government well--the good knowledge they have is also withheld from decision makers.