A public policy degree is more than just an MBA

After liberalisation reforms in 1991, India’s higher education scenario saw a shift towards management and there was a proliferation of academic institutions offering management degrees. We are observing a similar trend with institutes offering policy degrees.

Over the past decade, we have seen at least 60-70 postgraduate level public policy programmes around the country, launched by institutions of every stripe, ranging from policy research institutions, private universities, public universities, business schools, even the IIMs and IITs (despite their dominance in the higher education sector in India).

The degrees offered are also varied and range from certificate programs to undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, and even doctorates in some cases.

Public policy programs typically cater to a wide pool of applicants, including working professionals as well as students with or without prior work experience. As a result, they attract candidates from diverse educational and professional backgrounds. In India, the structure of public policy courses is not standardised yet. Many newer institutions offering these degrees or certificates either model themselves on Western public policy schools or experiment with interdisciplinary modules that draw from the social sciences and humanities, with economics often serving as the core foundation.

Having said that, public policy coursework in India is still skewed more towards economics as compared to other traditional disciplines to solve policy challenges.

Many institutions would like to be a part of this growing interest, but the question really is why? Just like the boom in management education, the policy consulting space has also grown over the past decade, with some newspaper reports, based on RTI filings, pointing out that the Big 4 consulting firms bagged at least 350 consulting assignments worth around ₹500 crore in 2023 alone.

There is no definite estimate of the size as most information is obscured in government budgets and therefore we rely on secondary estimates, but the pie is clearly large running into thousands of crores, if not billions of dollars. Accompanying this is an equally growing number of policy consulting, government strategic and advisory, and policy research firms and organisations. Again, no definitive estimate of size so far, but the growth in public policy programmes clearly indicates that there are enough jobs in this domain. There is also the additional factor of the decades-old tradition - one could almost say it’s like a rite of passage for many youth - of trying to ‘crack the IAS’, based on which academia can offer programmes that can help students at least partially meet their aspirations by offering public policy careers that work with the government even if they cannot work in the government.

It is no wonder then that some think that public policy is the new MBA. One can say that they are not wrong because it certainly looks that way with the diversity of opportunities within the consulting firms. But being not wrong doesn’t necessarily translate as being right. Public policy education cannot be an MBA education because, apart from the government being fundamentally different from a business in its orientation and goals, it also requires a different understanding.

We argue that at its core, studying public policy is to understand how the government functions and interacts with other actors in an ecosystem, so that such trained professionals can help the government do more and better when they work with it. And like almost any living entity, to get inside and understand it, we want to know how the government thinks and acts. The government is accountable in a democracy to explain how it acts, by providing us with copious amounts of data. Economics helps understand and interpret the data, management to act upon such interpretations and the other social sciences to understand the consequences of such actions.

None of the above disciplines tell us, deeply enough, as to how the government thinks. Data is a post hoc reflection of government actions; it cannot reveal how the government thinks - what are its priorities, motivations, choices and silences. It is through its procedures, notifications, circulars, orders, plan documents and such that we get a live insight into how the government thinks. Apart from data, and for the same reasons as data provision, the government provides us with copious amounts of paperwork. In fact, it is incumbent that governments in India leave a paper trail for every decision they make. The grammar of this paper trail is law and this paperwork is altogether considered ‘delegated legislation’. Without knowledge of law, we cannot understand how it thinks; nor can we make it think the way we would like it to.

So, it's clear that public policy should go beyond traditional disciplines given the nature and objective of the work associated. We are not trying to make the case that public policy is the new law degree. It is certainly not an MBA. We don’t know what it is an equivalent of, except to say that it is somewhere in between. Law is an essential part of an education in public policy, and most programmes and practitioners in India seem to ignore this. There are complex policy challenges concerning disruptive technologies involving the government, big tech, NGOs, public and many more actors for which existing laws need interpretation or new laws need to be framed together. Thus, such an outlook on public policy is the need of the hour.

Srikrishna Ayyangar is Chair and Devyani Pande is Vice Chair of the Master’s in Public Policy Programme at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru.