Practice Makes Perfect
As part of their training, public-policy majors get out of the library and into Chicago neighborhoods. By Jerome Tharaud, AB’02. Photographs by Dan Dry.
When Aruj Chaudhry and her team contacted officials and residents of the North Shore village of Winthrop Harbor to talk about lakefront conservation, they stepped into a conflict they hadn’t realized existed. One village official agreed to an interview but backed out after he was e-mailed the questions. Residents declined to meet as soon as the lakefront was mentioned.
Chaudhry, a third-year in the College, rehearses a typical resident reaction: “We don’t own the marina. We have nothing to do with the marina—we have nothing to do with the lakefront.” After visiting the village she and her team learned that from April to September some 3,000 visitors a day pass through town to reach the state-owned marina and yacht club, where membership fees are out of reach for most Winthrop Harbor residents. For students grappling with questions of who is accountable for lakefront conservation and who should pay for it, the waters were suddenly much murkier.
“I personally firmly believe that you cannot come to an effective policy if you are just sitting in a room doing research,” Chaudhry says. “We’ve seen when we came out into the community so many things that we didn’t anticipate would be there.” Welcome to research, public-policy style. Every year students in the undergraduate public policy studies major participate in the practicum, a required two-quarter policy methods crash course in which students tackle a policy question for a real-world client. In past years students have investigated immigration policy, public housing, and Chicago cultural institutions. This year about 50 students fanned out in groups across the North Shore to gauge ten communities’ willingness to participate in environmental conservation as part of a study by the Alliance for the Great Lakes, a Chicago-based environmental advocacy group.
The unexpected roadblocks and frustrations they met during their fieldwork are part of the point, says Woody Carter, a lecturer in public policy who is teaching this year’s practicum. “The ivory tower has a little window in the side. I’m up there and I’m kicking them out of that little hole into the world,” says Carter. “We make sure that they go out and do interviews in places they’re not comfortable in going, and that they talk to people they’re afraid of and who don’t want to talk to them, and that they do observation in settings where they’re not supposed to be—everything we can do to get them out of Hyde Park and out of their theoretical hermeneutic.”
That experience calls on a different set of skills than the ones students have honed throughout their academic careers, says Jim Leitzel, the director of the public policy studies major. “One of the things that distinguishes the practicum from other classes is it’s not about textbooks, it’s not about taking exams, and it’s not even about writing papers,” Leitzel says. “This really is about engaging with a real problem in Chicago.” Public policy studies is an interdisciplinary social sciences major that draws from economics, sociology, political science, and law. Students are required to take three classes that emphasize political, economic, and sociological approaches to public policy, as well as courses in economics and statistics. That gives them a range of skills— conducting surveys and interviews, using applied statistics, and preparing reports for clients—that Leitzel says would be harder to get in other majors. To balance that breadth with depth, students are required to take three courses in an area of specialization of their choice, complete the practicum, and write a senior thesis. The program’s other balancing act is between theory and practice. “All of our classes try to keep one eye at least on what’s happening in the real world, even when these classes are teaching things like microeconomic theory,” Leitzel says.
That’s appealing to students like third-year Elizabeth Chen, who came to the College interested in community health issues and intending to major in biology. Chen sometimes found science classes frustrating because the connections between what students learned in class and what they did in labs were not always clear. “You’ve been counting these flies for four hours and you’re trying to figure out, ‘Are they red eyes or white eyes, and what shape are their wings?’” Chen recalls. “It’s sometimes a little harder to see what exactly are the applications of this and how do we make the theory apply to whatever it is that we want to do.”
Then last year she received one of the College’s Metcalf internships and spent the summer working for the United Neighborhood Houses of New York, researching health programs run by the community-based organizations under the group’s umbrella. The experience gave Chen her first taste of the policy world. By the time she came back to school last fall, she had decided to change her major to public policy.
“I think public policy is one of the few majors where there is a lot of practical application, because policy is something that’s practiced. It is something that is theorized too, but the intention is to go out and create policy, shape policy, not watch it happen,” explains Chen, who is also pursuing a second major in English.
The program is designed to meet the needs of students who want to apply their knowledge outside the classroom, says Richard Taub, a professor of sociology and social sciences who ran the public policy major for nearly three decades.
“This is a university that glorifies itself in its commitment to abstract, ratiocinative activity,” explains Taub, who now chairs the Department of Comparative Human Development. “But there are always a lot of very good students on campus for whom that doesn’t really work.” Some students he knew “wanted to get involved in the real world, and many of the courses they took in the standard disciplines didn’t give them the opportunity to do that.”
When he became program director in 1975, the ten-year-old program had only eight students and was “a little inchoate.” Taub reshaped it: he are required to take three classes that emphasize political, economic, and sociological approaches to public policy, as well as courses in economics and statistics. That gives them a range of skills— conducting surveys and interviews, using applied statistics, and preparing reports for clients—that Leitzel says would be harder to get in other majors. To balance that breadth with depth, students are required to take three courses in an area of specialization of their choice, complete the practicum, and write a senior thesis. The program’s other balancing act is between theory and practice. “All of our classes try to keep one eye at least on what’s happening in the real world, even when these classes are teaching things like microeconomic theory,” Leitzel says.
That’s appealing to students like third-year Elizabeth Chen, who came to the College interested in community health issues and intending to major in biology. Chen sometimes found science classes frustrating because the connections between what students learned in class and what they did in labs were not always clear. “You’ve been counting these flies for four hours and you’re trying to figure out, ‘Are they red eyes or white eyes, and what shape are their wings?’” Chen recalls. “It’s sometimes a little harder to see what exactly are the applications of this and how do we make the theory apply to whatever it is that we want to do.”
Then last year she received one of the College’s Metcalf internships and spent the summer working for the United Neighborhood Houses of New York, researching health programs run by the community-based organizations under the group’s umbrella. The experience gave Chen her first taste of the policy world. By the time she came back to school last fall, she had decided to change her major to public policy.
“I think public policy is one of the few majors where there is a lot of practical application, because policy is something that’s practiced. It is something that is theorized too, but the intention is to go out and create policy, shape policy, not watch it happen,” explains Chen, who is also pursuing a second major in English.
The program is designed to meet the needs of students who want to apply their knowledge outside the classroom, says Richard Taub, a professor of sociology and social sciences who ran the public policy major for nearly three decades. “This is a university that glorifies itself in its commitment to abstract, ratiocinative activity,” explains Taub, who now chairs the Department of Comparative Human Development. “But there are always a lot of very good students on campus for whom that doesn’t really work.” Some students he knew “wanted to get involved in the real world, and many of the courses they took in the standard disciplines didn’t give them the opportunity to do that.”
When he became program director in 1975, the ten-year-old program had only eight students and was “a little inchoate.” Taub reshaped it: he emphasized fieldwork by introducing the practicum, found internships in the community and gave students academic credit for taking them, and added new requirements and goals.
Since then the program has grown, and now regularly enrolls 100 students or more. Taub attributes much of that popularity to the College’s growth over the last three decades—from a student body of about 2,000 students drawn to a unique intellectual environment, to a population of about 5,000 students with a wider array of needs and interests, including a desire for applied knowledge and community involvement.
The search for degrees that can translate into jobs may be another reason for the major’s popularity. The program does not keep data on its students’ activities after college, but Leitzel is a firm believer in the degree’s marketability. “Our evidence is that it opens doors, it doesn’t close any,” he says. Graduates end up working in government, the nonprofit sector, consulting firms, and even investment banks.
Fourth-year public policy major Charlie Wysong graduates in June, but he is already working full time as a research associate at A+ Illinois, an education advocacy organization. Wysong, whose senior thesis is a statistical analysis of education-funding lawsuits in all 50 states, says his public-policy background comes in handy in his job. “I actually find it really helpful—especially the practicum component, which taught me about how to do research in an attractive and efficient way that will be useful to policymakers and advocates,” he says. Wysong has been admitted to Stanford Law School but has deferred admission for a year to research issues such as workplace safety regulations for two Stanford law professors.
Leitzel says law school seems to be the most popular career path for his students and estimates that another 15 percent pursue advanced degrees in public policy. Some go in other directions, like fourth-year Allison Burlock, who plans to enter a master’s program in biostatistics next year at the University of Michigan. Burlock’s senior thesis uses biostatistics and epidemiology to question the causal link between obesity and diabetes assumed by current health policy, and she hopes eventually to get her PhD and help physicians or pharmaceutical companies design studies and analyze data. “You’re not excluded from anything in public policy,” says Burlock, adding that she could use her major for public health programs, law school, social work, or consulting.
Students across the country seem to be banking on that flexibility: public policy is an increasingly popular major in the U.S., and more than 40 programs exist nationwide at peer institutions like Duke and Stanford. Does its popularity here mean Chicago students are trading their famed life of the mind for better job prospects? Leitzel doesn’t think so. “I like to think that public-policy students are sort of...” he pauses as if searching for the words, “renaissance people with marketable skills.”
