Jackson Prepares to Launch as Professional School in Fall 2022

What are the major changes Jackson will make when it becomes a professional school?

We will be investing in people who want to make a difference by solving the most challenging problems in global affairs. This means significantly expanding our faculty whose research informs critical public policy challenges in international security, development, trade, climate, global health, human rights, and other areas. Central to this investment is changing our twoyear professional degree to a master in public policy (M.P.P.) and reimagining our curriculum to better prepare future global affairs professionals for impactful leadership. Jackson has always been a community in which students, faculty, and distinguished practitioners come together to work on important global problems. As a professional school, the Jackson community will have the resources, scale, and focus to make an even greater difference in the world.

What was the rationale behind changing the degree name from an M.A. to an M.P.P.?

Students enrolled in our two-year graduate program have diverse goals but share a commitment to careers as public service professionals. Changing our degree name to an M.P.P. communicates to prospective students and employers our focus on developing the professional skills needed for policymaking leadership. We deliver students an interdisciplinary education that provides them with the ideas, concepts, and skills to be creative problem solvers in a lifelong career in global a airs. Our core curriculum integrates fundamental insights from academic disciplines such as economics, political science, and history with the development of analytical and communication skills. Jackson’s program is intellectually dynamic and challenging but focused on ideas and skill-building directly relevant to a career as global a airs professionals. It is this mission that makes the M.P.P. degree name a great fit.

What will most distinguish the Yale Jackson School of Global A airs from its peer policy schools?

Jackson’s M.P.P. occupies a unique place among international affairs graduate programs because of its flexibility and size. The four-course interdisciplinary core curriculum provides students with a shared intellectual foundation focused on acquisition of the ideas, ways of thinking, and skills needed for leadership in global affairs. The small core both prepares students to identify and investigate solutions to the global issues they are most passionate about and gives students the unusual flexibility to design an individualized course of study around those issues by taking advantage of the extraordinary breadth of courses and resources at Jackson and across Yale. With about thirty-five students in each entering class, Jackson’s program is small by design. Our size allows us to deliver distinctive programs such as a writing program integrated into the core curriculum that provides students with extensive training and feedback in writing for different objectives in the policymaking process. It also encourages graduate students to form an intimate and close-knit learning community among themselves as well as with faculty and practitioners.