Category:People with a Master of Public Administration
City hall is the natural habitat of this credential. The mayors of Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Fresno and New York City all hold a Master of Public Administration, and so do a Prime Minister of Singapore, a President of Liberia and a Secretary of Defense. The MPA is a professional degree in the management of public agencies, and in this membership it separates cleanly from the law degree: it routes people into executive administration and the appropriations process rather than onto the bench.
Background
The degree is taken mid-career far more often than straight out of college, and the biographies here show it. A typical entry has an undergraduate degree in something unrelated, several years in local government, a nonprofit or the military, and then the MPA as the credential that preceded a move up. That is why the roster is short on academics and long on executives, and why so many of its members are running something rather than studying it.
The institutions divide into two groups. A handful of national programs recur, principally the Harvard Kennedy School and Princeton's public and international affairs school. The rest is regional and public: state universities, city universities and commuter campuses close to where the member was already working.
City hall
Andre Dickens took an MPA at Georgia State before becoming the sixty-first mayor of Atlanta. Cherelle Parker took hers at the University of Pennsylvania before becoming the hundredth mayor of Philadelphia and the first woman in the office. London Breed took hers at the University of San Francisco before serving as the forty-fifth mayor of San Francisco. Vi Lyles took hers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and worked as a public administrator before becoming the fifty-ninth mayor of Charlotte. Bill Peduto took his at the University of Pittsburgh before serving as the sixtieth mayor of that city. Ben Walsh took his at Syracuse University, in his own hometown, before becoming its mayor. Lee Brand took his at the University of Southern California before serving as the twenty-fifth mayor of Fresno. Eric Adams took his at Marist College after a career in the New York City Police Department and before becoming the hundred and eleventh mayor of New York City.
The degree also travels above city level. Dan McKee took his at the Harvard Kennedy School before the Rhode Island governorship. Kris Mayes took hers at Columbia before becoming Arizona's twenty-seventh attorney general. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf took hers at Harvard before becoming the first elected female head of state in Africa, and Lawrence Wong took his at Princeton's public and international affairs school before the Singaporean premiership.
The Kennedy School and the Washington pipeline
Harvard's Kennedy School is the single most common institution in this category, and its graduates here sit on both sides of the aisle and on both sides of the executive-legislative line. Mark Esper took an MPA there, alongside a West Point degree and a doctorate, before serving as the twenty-seventh Secretary of Defense. Pete Rouse took his there before becoming acting White House chief of staff and senior adviser to President Obama. In Congress the same school produced Dan Crenshaw, Brian Higgins, Gerry Connolly, John Moolenaar and Seth Moulton, the last of whom holds a Harvard bachelor's degree, an MBA and an MPA together.
The rest of the congressional group took the degree closer to home, and the pattern is consistent: a state school near the district. Jeff Merkley went to Princeton, Blake Moore to Northwestern, Jim McGovern to American University, Dusty Johnson to Kansas, Randy Feenstra to Iowa State, Rick Larsen to Minnesota, Kristen McDonald Rivet to Michigan–Flint, Kevin Mullin to San Francisco State, Mike Thompson to Chico State, Jodey Arrington to Texas Tech and Wesley Hunt to Cornell, where he took an MBA, an MPA and a master's in arts at once.
See also
This category currently contains no pages or media.