San Francisco Program Combines Theory and Practice of Nonprofit Work

January 8, 2004 | Read Time: 9 minutes

Barb Larson began considering master’s studies after five years of working for American Red Cross

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affiliates in California — and after nudges from colleagues, including her boss.

“I knew I was going to be in the nonprofit sector my whole career,” she says. “I was getting a ton of great experience, but I also thought that I could be a stronger leader if I went back and got more education.”

When she won the Red Cross’s Presidential Scholarship — a $10,000 award — she felt the decisive nudge. She mulled seeking a master’s of business administration, but was swayed by a co-worker’s recommendation of the University of San Francisco’s nonprofit-administration program and enrolled in 1999.

“One of the nice things about the USF program is that it’s taught by practitioners,” says Ms. Larson, who is wrapping up her thesis while she works as director of donor services in the San Jose, Calif., office of the Community Foundation Silicon Valley. “I was looking for the combination of the theory and the practice. I felt like it had some components of an M.B.A. program, but was very practical to what my career path was going to be.

Since beginning her master’s, she says, she has been promoted three times, moves she attributes in part to what she has learned in her studies.

“I have a broader view, having been through the program, of how an organization works,” she says. “I manage more people, which I attribute to learning about how to manage human resources and be a good leader.”

Building the Program

The university began offering a master of nonprofit administration in 1983 in response to the requests of local nonprofit leaders for improved management training, making it the first university to offer a free-standing master’s degree in the discipline.

The program was built with the help of grants from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. In the early 1990s, two nondegree certificate programs were added: one in nonprofit management designed for executives, and the other a credential for fund raisers. (Students in the master’s program will be able to specialize in fund raising beginning in the 2005-6 academic year, says Mike Cortés, director of the university’s Institute for Nonprofit Organization Management, which conducts research on philanthropy and oversees the master’s curriculum.)

In September, the university began offering the master’s program at its Santa Rosa and Sacramento campuses.

The program, he says, is aimed at working professionals who are already committed to nonprofit careers: Prospective students are required to have at least two years of paid experience in the nonprofit field.

As a result, internships are not mandatory, though the degree does require completion of a final project, such as writing a strategic or fund-raising plan, which can be done on behalf of a charity.

Ms. Larson, who attended school part-time while working, found that class projects could frequently be applied to aid her employer.

“I pretty much had projects that tested every part of the foundation,” she says. “I could go to our HR person and say, ‘In my HR class we have all these project options. Are any of them projects that the foundation could use?’”

Because the foundation was experiencing rapid growth, she found plenty of opportunities to benefit both her employer and her studies. In one instance, she wrote the grant maker’s first information-technology plan; in another, she developed an urgently needed worker-safety plan.

Focusing on Charities

The advantage of a program like San Francisco’s — as opposed to a program that relegates nonprofit management to a concentration within a master’s in business or public administration — is its emphasis on applying its lessons specifically to nonprofit work.

“If you’re taking a human-resources management course, if you’re taking it with an M.P.A. degree, you’re going to learn something about civil service on top of everything else. If you’re taking a master of nonprofit administration, you’re going to learn something about volunteer management. If you’re taking the course with an M.B.A., you probably won’t get either of those areas of application,” Mr. Cortés says. “And yet some of the principles taught by those courses will be common to all three fields.”

The university, which was founded as a Jesuit institution in 1855, has always been strongly committed to social justice, a credo that continues today in the nonprofit-administration program, says Mr. Cortés.

“Ours is a program that is intended for students of all faiths and backgrounds — including students of no faith,” he says. The university, he says, works to improve society’s ability to pursue its common values. “It’s something that’s central to the curriculum, and something that’s central to our mission.”

One way it does that is by creating a society within the classroom: Each incoming class is composed of between 10 and 20 students who earn their degrees together. This approach, says Ms. Larson, offers a multitude of advantages for nonprofit professionals. “You can not only get the theory out of the classes but have people who are doing it every day, sharing stories about, ‘I had this HR incident in my office and here’s how we dealt with it,’” she says.

While sharing experiences, she says, the peers can help fill in gaps in the formal course work — for instance, she says, offering anecdotes and advice about a rapidly changing subject like online fund raising. “In a couple of my classes,” she says, “there were so many topics and the field was moving so fast that the cohort would add more of the current issues facing us, versus the curriculum. It’s hard to change curriculum every year.”

Students may find that they benefit most from parts of the course work they did not initially value. Although Marcia A. Hodges, who completed her degree in 1990, says she originally entered the program to deepen her board-governance and fund-raising skills, she has since discovered that the theoretical components of the curriculum, rather than the practical techniques, have aided her the most.

“At the time, I didn’t like the theory classes because I didn’t think they were practical enough. But I know that’s what sticks with me in terms of being able to see the big picture,” says Ms. Hodges, who just started a new job as chief operating officer of YMCA of the East Bay, in Oakland, Calif.

For Robert Glavin, the theory courses were the main attraction. A 30-year veteran of nonprofit work, he learned of the master’s program during his late-1980s stint as the university’s director of development and enrolled in 1996.

“I was at a fairly advanced point in my career, and I was going for somewhat luxurious reasons: I wanted to find the theoretical basis for the many things I had learned during my work,” says Mr. Glavin, who completed his degree three years ago and now works as a management consultant for Fitzgerald & Graves, which specializes in nonprofit clients.

“I had learned a lot on the job — toward a deadline, for a client, for an employer,” he says. “I wanted to plug what I knew into a more formal body of knowledge.”

The program, he says, deepened his ability to help his consulting clients, giving him access to state-of-the-art research on the nonprofit field. Also, he says, the degree impresses clients: “They see me as combining the direct experience I have with a more formal knowledge base.”

Despite the degree’s prestige, he says, it is not a shortcut to leadership. ‘I have over the years in my various jobs hired an enormous number of people, and some of them have had this degree and tried to use that as the justification to be hired as an executive director, or a development director, or a marketing director,” says Mr. Glavin, who now teaches fund raising and marketing in the program. “I don’t think you can acquire the expertise to do those jobs without doing jobs in those fields.”

Making Changes

The university is currently updating its program to reflect changing times, says Mr. Cortés.

Since the 2000 U.S. Census showed that whites have become a minority in California — and that trend is expected to spread across the country — the program has been trying to focus on how such shifts will affect the nonprofit field, he says. This attention to diversity shows up throughout the curriculum, he says. For instance, a course on nonprofit marketing takes into account a diverse audience for a charity’s message, a course on fund raising discusses new research on giving traditions in different cultures, and a course on governance places emphasis on the need for maintaining a board that has links to emerging immigrant groups.

In addition, the university is responding to feedback from program alumni and local nonprofit professionals by adding a number of concentrations.

Beginning this term, masters’s students can declare specializations in areas including information technology, human-resources management, health services, and public policy and advocacy.

A recently completed review of the course work proposed that the program be expanded from 36 to 42 credits, and said that more instruction is needed in the areas of public policy and advocacy, entrepreneurship, and leadership and ethics, according to Mr. Cortés. While awaiting administrative approval of these suggested changes, the program is offering its students new electives in public policy and advocacy, has expanded its technology course, and has added a field project as an alternative to a previously required written thesis.

Another demographic trend looms: In recent years, Mr. Cortés says, faculty members have begun debating whether to alter the curriculum to address the needs of younger professionals.

“Students are coming to the idea of getting a degree in the field earlier in their career,” he says.

Because of the program’s specialized nature, Ms. Hodges says she would recommend it only for those who are certain they will stay in the nonprofit world. A master’s in business administration, she says, might make a reasonable alternative to those who plan to switch fields during their careers. However, she says, the focused degree could help job seekers convince nonprofit employers of their commitment. “I’ve reviewed thousands of résumés in my career,” she says, “and it speaks volumes, when you know that that’s where their heart is.”

Lara L. McDavit provided additional reporting for this article.

UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO

Program: Master of nonprofit administration

Offered by: College of Professional Studies

Locations: San Francisco, Sacramento, and Santa Rosa, Calif.

Number of enrolled students: 87 (all campuses)

Average number of students admitted each year: 80

Percentage of students who apply who are admitted: 80

Tuition costs: $730 per credit

Percentage of students who receive financial aid: 65

Percentage who attend full time: 0

Average age of students: 35.9