While the first year of the Master program in Public Policy is structured around the policy process, the second year gives you the flexibility to co-design the curriculum according to your preferences and interests.
In the first year of the Master program in Public Policy, you are required to complete a set of core courses designed to provide a comprehensive toolkit for public policy. Throughout the first year, you also work in groups on a policy project in collaboration with a government agency or other organization. The project has deliverables throughout the year integrated into the core courses. A parallel skills track further develops your abilities in oral communication, AI-assisted writing and negotiation.
The first year is designed to help you navigate the full policy process:
Before you can solve a societal problem, you must understand its causes and what objective society is trying to achieve when addressing the problem. In the first phase, we focus on what the policy issue is and why it matters. You will learn about the big policy challenges of our time and what the ethical and economic rationale is for why a government should intervene.
Effective policies need to be grounded in both theory and data. In the second stage, we ask how we can find the policy solutions that actually work.
Policy does not exist in a vacuum. The theoretically optimal policy is often not feasible due to various political, legal, organizational and institutional constraints. To be effective, you must understand the environment that shapes policies and learn to navigate organizational complexity. In this phase, we study these constraints and how we can tackle them to implement policy effectively.
The final step is ensuring that a policy actually achieves the objective it was set out to solve. In this part, we explore how we evaluate success and ensure accountability. You will learn how to oversee public service delivery and how to use data to evaluate policies.
Master's thesis combined with an internship during one semester (30 ECTS) and choose between the following in the second semester (30 ECTS):
If you have specific questions about our MSc programs, the different program components or the application process, you are welcome to contact the MSc admissions team.
You can also connect with our current students via the chat platform Unibuddy to learn more about their experiences at SSE. Start chatting!
