From the day you enroll at the Ford School, you’re part of a great community—close-knit, engaged, and active while in school, and well-connected, involved, and committed long after graduation.

With approximately 110 MPP students, 25 MPA students, 6 PhD students, and 80 undergraduate students entering each year, the Ford School offers tremendous opportunities for leadership, collaboration, and participation.

This past year has been full of challenges for all of us: health and safety, racial justice and policing, the state of our democracy, and more.

Here at the Ford School, our faculty and staff have made supporting our students and caring for each other our top priority. And we remained fully committed to our teaching, research, service, and policy engagement missions.

Despite the challenges, our graduate students have had a communal, connected year. They joined together in internship search groups, helped our administration pivot during the pandemic, won a national case competition award for international policy, networked with alumni, organized events, helped real-world clients navigate the pandemic, and conducted important research and service in Detroit.

Read more about our incredible community in our school’s bi-annual magazine, State & Hill.

• Leading through crisis – Dean Barr and others reflect on public leadership and how the Ford School has managed the pandemic’s effects.
• Ford School votes—and supports our electoral process – members of our community learned about and supported our democracy in many ways this key election year.
• Preparing leaders for the public good – the school’s growing Leadership Initiative offers new opportunities for students.
• Currents – videos of alumni, faculty, and students describe action on urgent issues on campus, in Congress, and across the globe.

We hope you choose to join our warm community of professionals dedicated to the public good.

Our faculty are enthusiastic teachers and mentors who prize the school’s close-knit, collaborative community.

Alongside their critical work in the classroom, Ford School faculty members are nationally and internationally recognized experts in vitally important policy areas. And they’re deeply engaged in the world of practice. They include senior government advisors, current and former members of the Council of Economic Advisers, leaders of international nonprofits, and more.

Hear from some of the experts who will be teaching a course you may take next year:

• John Ciorciari, Shobita Parthasarathy, Luke Shaefer, and Justin Wolfers break down policy priorities for the Biden Administration.
• Robert Hampshire works at the intersection of public policy and engineering, and with the City of Detroit Office of Mobility Innovation to address food insecurity during the pandemic.
• Catherine Hausman explains the concept and arguments for and against a carbon tax.
• Shobita Parthasarathy’s new report shows the U.S. approach to innovation is inadequate to address health disparities — with consequences laid bare by COVID-19.
• Adrienne Harris explains how “fintech” plays a role during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Barry Rabe and the NAPA working group proposed a climate action plan for 2021.
• Betsey Stevenson testified to the House Ways and Means on consequences of fiscal relief inaction.

Listen to Javed Ali’s The Burn Bag podcast on national security.

Start your application today! Application fee waivers available to the first 150 who request and submit their application by December 15.

NOTE: This announcement was released on December 1, 2020.

Hello,

It has been a busy few weeks here! For those of you who applied to the masters’ programs, we are in the midst of reviewing applications and are really enjoying learning about our prospective new community members. I wanted to bring to your attention the Michigan PolicyCast. Organized by two current Ford School MPP students, Shawn Danino and Matt Hillard, they are exploring a variety of topics related to government and policy. This is entirely their own project and I think they are off to a great start.

All the best, Beth

Last year our president, Mark Schlissel, charged the university with creating a five year strategic plan to address the issues of diversity, equity and inclusion on our campus. As a community, we conducted surveys, held focus groups and had many discussions about the many facets that need to be addressed in crafting such a plan. Each school on campus submitted their plan to the Provost’s Office for review and, over the summer, those plans were woven together to help create a university wide plan. In October we launched our plan and many activities have already taken place. Our Communications and Outreach office has written an article about some of these activities. As many of the prospective students I speak with ask about issues related to diversity and inclusion, I thought you might find it interesting and hope you will read it when you have a few minutes.

Best wishes, Beth

If you are in the U.S., this morning you woke up to a country rocked by the tumultuous events of yesterday. Perhaps those of you living in other parts of the globe were also surprised by the election results. One of our students walked into the office this morning and said “I’m so glad to be in policy school where everyone wants to talk about this.” Our dean, Susan Collins, sent a statement to our community today about the importance of the work going on here. I thought you might enjoy reading a portion of her letter.

Dean Collins says, “We here at the Ford School are privileged in the sense that we can do so much more than simply hope for a better nation, for better leadership. Every day we can prepare students like those who modeled our values so well last night (at our community election watch party). We can study, write, teach, and engage. We can become the citizens and public servants that our great nation deserves and so desperately needs. Individually and collectively, we can act with strength and civility to keep moving forward.

Yesterday afternoon, President Obama said that ‘no matter what happens, the sun will rise in the morning’. Like the sun, we all rose this morning. We called our friends and loved ones, we got our kids ready for school, we resolved in our own way to keep working at it–to keep building the fair, just, peaceful America that we hold in our hearts.”

Regardless of your party affiliation or political beliefs, I think many of us are weary from this grueling political season. It is my hope that we will get better at civil discourse and mend the divides in our society as well as the divisions with our global neighbors.

All the best, Beth

Thank you for visiting our admissions blog! As you explore your potential graduate school path, we hope the information provided here will give you a taste of life as a Ford School student (aka Fordie).

The entering class of masters’ students for Fall 2016 numbers 116 students. You can see a variety of demographics in the list below.

• Incoming class size: 116
• 11 MPA students
• 105 MPP students
• Average age: 27
• Age range: 22-48
• Non-U.S: 29 percent
• Students of color (U.S. only): 41.5 percent
• Female: 52 percent
• Male: 48 percent
• Years of work experience: 3.6
• Countries of origin: 14

These numbers demonstrate the wide variety of paths that students take before entering the Ford School. In this class, the range of undergraduate majors range from the more traditional (economics, political science) to those that are less common (civil engineering, astronomy and architecture). Our students worked as teachers, researchers, journalists and community organizers. I am often asked the question “How would you describe a typical Ford School student”? My answer is this – they are committed to improving some aspect of our society. Their passion may relate to education, environment, housing, energy, economic development or some combination thereof but it is always about improving the lot of others.

In addition to the posts on this blog, I wanted to extend a couple of invitations to learn about the Ford School in other formats. First, we will be hosting a graduate information session on Saturday, November 12th from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Faculty, staff and current students will participate. We hope you will join us if your schedule allows. You can register here.

If you are not able to visit in person, our current students, led by our Students of Color in Public Policy and Out in Public student organizations, are conducting our Pipeline Initiative (PI) program, assigning current students to serve as mentors to prospective students through the application process. If you are interested in signing up to participate in PI, you can do that at this link.

If there are questions you would like us to address in future posts, please contact us at fspp-admissions@umich.edu.