The department offers one program, the Masters in Public Policy (MPP). This is a two-year, full-time, cohort based program. The intake is between 25 and 30 students per year for a total program of 55 to 60 full-time graduate students.
The first two semesters of the program consists of core courses in political science, economics, quantitative and qualitative methods, and public policy analysis. All students then complete a co-op internship in the summer semester. This is an officially recognized co-op, run with the help of SFU Co-operative Education.
The last two semesters of the program are comprised of the major policy research project – the capstone, and elective courses in a wide variety of policy fields that students take from us or other graduate departments at SFU or UBC (through the Western Deans Agreement). Our elective courses are open to graduate students in other disciplines and, when space is available, so are our first-year core courses.
Our electives include (depending on teaching resources) health policy, environmental policy, globalization, cost-benefit/multi-criteria analysis, sustainability, social policy, Aboriginal policy, public sector management, municipal governance, negotiations, education policy, compliance, and recent additions – advanced quantitative and qualitative analysis. When resources permitted, we have attracted faculty from other SFU departments to teach for us (e.g., Economics, Political Science).
The capstone project is a major piece of independent research overseen by a supervisor, but discussed in weekly seminar groups. The capstone must be on a relevant public policy problem, where the student must apply the research methodologies taught in the program to come up with viable policy recommendations. The capstones synthesize the cross-disciplinary teaching in the program and yield high quality substantive reports, some of which have been published and earned major national awards.