Suchergebnisse

One feature of heavily centralized government with nationally uniform policies is the limited scope for policy experimentation. Policies cannot readily be trialled and there is little opportunity to learn from small scale implementation. Increasing centralization in Britain has been accompanied by a developing managerial ethos within central government. HM Treasury has demanded that new policies be given explicit objectives and an evaluation strategy be implemented. The inability to use randomized controls has led to creative evaluation strategies that stress the understanding of process rather than the measurement of outcome. With the desire to tighten further Government's grip on public expenditure, the demand is now for pilot schemes and impact analysis. Focusing on social assistance, the paper details the changing environment of policy evaluation in Britain, reviews non experimental methods that have been used and documents the first two policy pilots. The paper concludes with a discussion of the opportunities and dangers arising from the move towards experimentation.

One of the happier educational products of the war was the widespread self-examination it encouraged among American colleges. With the wartime slump in enrollments, those members of the faculty who remained on the campus were commonly given the task of planning the postwar educational programs of their respective institutions. We are now in that postwar period, and much of this admirable effort has been dropped to grapple with the heavy enrollments the schools were presumably planning to meet. But in many schools, whether the curricula underwent any major operations or not, there remains a ferment of doubt and argument over the adequacy of what they are doing.This ferment is not likely to die out soon. Colleges which brushed aside the polemics of Mr. Hutchins at Chicago a decade ago are still agitated by the Harvard Report on General Education. Harvard, like the College of the University of Chicago, is proceeding to make major departures from the prevailing practices of American colleges. Columbia College has paced the adoption of integrated courses in Western Civilization. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, guiding light of American technical schools, has discovered that engineers should also be liberally educated men and has made curricular changes designed to do something about it. The University of Florida and Michigan State College have moved sharply in the same direction, more or less independently, by creating basic colleges through which all would-be technicians and specialists must percolate before burying themselves in their chosen profession. Other schools are instituting comprehensive courses, tightening up the elective system, and otherwise taking steps to insure that general education is not lost in the scramble to prepare for a job.

The current slump in the number of university students taking courses in public administration suggests that this is a good time to reflect on what form education for the public service should take after the war. It is highly probable that many university students will again undertake to prepare themselves for jobs and careers in government, despite an inevitable reduction in the number of federal employees. Educational assistance to veterans may, in fact, cause a large and sudden increase in the numbers attending colleges and universities with an eye to a government job after graduation. I should like to discuss the kind of education which should be offered such students after the war, whether or not they are veterans. My comments are directed primarily toward undergraduate instruction. The advanced work on administrative theory and problems carried on by graduate faculties and candidates for the Ph.D. is a separate subject.Basically, the problem of education for the public service involves two questions. First, what are the most important demands which the public service makes upon the individual? Second, how can the universities contribute most to developing the qualities needed to meet these demands?The demands which the public service makes upon the individual are many and varied. They cannot all be anticipated in advance; and if they could be, there would not be time in the university to give specific training for meeting all of them. Thus some determination must be made as to the kind of demands that are most important. Such a determination was, in fact, being made before the war by university faculties teaching public administration and political science. Students preparing for the public service were being asked to spend an increasing amount of time in the study of techniques, procedures, and skills currently in use in governmental practice. Most prominent among these were personnel management, budgetary and fiscal administration, accounting, statistics, government procurement practice, office management, and similar subjects.