USC Price Blog

Master of Public Administration (MPA) online students at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy cap off their degrees with a capstone project that makes a real-world impact.

BY KELLY CAMPBELL RAWLINGS When COVID-19 first appeared on our radars and began showing up in our communities, we braced for impact. States were locked down and everyone scrambled to respond to emergency conditions. Schools went online, employees worked from home, and we hunkered down for what we thought might be a few weeks of…

BY MATTHEW WHEELER All of our eyes are wide open, but what happens when the eyes are on you as the professor as students seek productive and safe places to share their emotions?  As a professor of online learning for nearly a decade, it has taken time to realize that our global classrooms are more…

Interested to learn more about our alumni and their public service values?  Listen in as Jonathan Westendorf and Sean Hallman talk about their professional and volunteer experiences during the early months of COVID-19.  One a Fire Chief, the other a veteran, U.S. Navy employee and whiskey distillery owner both share what they learned at USC,…

BY DORA KINGSLEY VERTENTEN Online education is programming that the USC Price School has been perfecting for ten years. The MPA online program has been wildly enhanced by implementation of soft skills learning along with the usual critical thinking and analytic lessons for students.  Students in the MPAOL program report participating in more than 50 virtual…

BY DORA KINGSLEY VERTENTEN USC Price School has announced the 2020 John Randolph and Dora Haynes Award for the Outstanding and Honorable Mention Capstone projects for the master’s in public administration program. This year’s nominated projects covered a wide array of critical and timely public administration and nonprofit management research topics using a rich and diverse palette…

BY TARA BLANC Much has been made (and rightly so) about the problems involved in the sudden move of most of the nation’s universities to online classes in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s no doubt that many faculty and students have struggled with the concepts and processes of remote learning that were imposed…

BY MATTHEW WHEELER Guess what, public administrators… there’s a knock at our door.  That sound?  Why yes, that is opportunity.  Perhaps relevance, legitimacy and validation knocking too.  Of course, we all understand our value as fiduciaries of public interest.  However; we also understand our own professional achilles of the public recognizing our craft and value. …

BY TARA BLANC As my spring MPA capstone students were winding up their project reports, questions came up about whether and how to incorporate the real-time impact of the coronavirus crisis into the recommendations students had crafted for their clients. How could they offer any useful insights for their clients about how to address the…

BY MATTHEW WHEELER As a professor of online learning for nearly a decade, it took years to build comfort and rapport in our virtual classrooms.  In my initial online classes, I would require all students to turn their cameras on so that I could view their attentiveness and prowess for participation.  When a student would…