Columbia University in the City of New York

Date: Dec 31 1969
Major: Public Policy (This Major's Salary over time)
The Master of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy program?s objective is to create environmental leaders of the future. It attempts to mix, science, econ, policy and management in a one year intensive program with the ultimate goal of creating a well-rounded leader able to take on challenges like climate change. However it utterly fails at this.

The main reason for failure is that it selects a large number of students that have very little or no experience in the core functions needed to succeed. The class is not made up of policy analysts or environmental scientists or even natural resource economists. Actually the amount of people with the proper mix of core skills are the minority. The typical class includes 30yo people with completely irrelevant backgrounds think art or history and 21yo kids who may have an academic background but no management or work experience.

These large gaps mean that ALL of the course work is done at a VERY basic level more similar to freshmen intro courses than actual 500 level graduate courses. A prepared candidate with a 100-200 level course work of the pre-mentioned above fields could test out of 70-90% of the required coursework. This leads to no real skill development, especially not the level you would expect from a graduate program at an Ivy League school. Because of the lack of skill development you also see very low job placements rates, which the program does a good job of disguising by not providing concentration specific data. Most people go back to the industries they came from and do not transfer into the sustainability or environmental field.

In short this program will not prepare someone to work in the field of environmental science or policy. It does however gain you access to Columbia. Many people do find good employment from the program but that is solely due to networking. If you want to buy a quick, very easy, Ivy League degree and leverage your undergraduate experience into a better paying job this is the right program. If you however, want to actually work in the green space or actually want to learn the skills needed to make big changes then stay the hell away from this program.