Gaining Success by Degrees

More charity workers seek education in nonprofit-management programs

Marcia A. Hodges recalls when a charity leader told her that she would not reach her goal of being a

nonprofit executive until she was at least 30 years old and had a master’s degree. “At that time, I was in my early 20s,” she says, laughing. “So I had a ways to go, and only one thing to get me there sooner.”

But then, a few years later, fate took a hand: She was working at Big Brothers Big Sisters in Oakland, Calif., when the executive director left, and she was promoted to fill the slot.

“I was 27 years old, with no master’s degree, and was suddenly an executive director — even though I’d been told several years earlier that that wasn’t possible,” she says.

She sought to polish her skills to fit her new leadership role, and enrolled at the University of San Francisco to earn a master’s of nonprofit administration. She feels that the degree, which she earned in 1990, has boosted her career ever since.

“No one has said, ‘You’re getting this job because you have a master’s in nonprofit administration,’” she says. “But what I think it does is helps people recognize that I’m serious about being in nonprofit management, that I want to be the best I can be. It makes it clear that this is the path I’m going to stay on.”

This week, Ms. Hodges leaves her job as vice president of operations at Yosemite National Institutes, an environmental-education group in Sausalito, Calif., to become chief operating officer of the YMCA of the East Bay, in Oakland.

240 Colleges Offer Courses

Over the past decade, more nonprofit professionals like Ms. Hodges have sought graduate-level education in nonprofit management, from an increasing number of academic programs.

More than 90 colleges and universities now offer formal programs — whether master’s degrees or concentrations — focusing on nonprofit management, while more than 240 institutions offer at least one course in the subject, according to Roseanne M. Mirabella, a Seton Hall University researcher who has been documenting the growth of such efforts.

The field is varied: Although nearly half of the degrees are master’s in public administration that offer specialties in nonprofit management, some business and social-work master’s programs also offer the concentration. About 10 master’s degrees, such as those found at Case Western Reserve University, the University of San Francisco, and the online-only Regis University, focus solely on nonprofit studies.

Such academic programs are an organized way to train charity managers and are a positive development for the field, says Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector, a national coalition of foundations and charities, in Washington.

“By having courses specifically designed and focused on the range of skills that are specifically needed for nonprofit managers,” she says, “we are increasing the possibility of having competent, knowledgeable, skilled people in the field, working their way to top leadership positions and running the field in an effective way.”

However, she cautions, the academic field of nonprofit management is still young, and thus much research needs to be completed to measure the effectiveness of the programs in preparing charity workers for their jobs.

In addition, say educators, as funds grow tight throughout the nonprofit world, academic programs face challenges as they work to keep pace with the needs of the working professionals who fill their classrooms.

Education vs. Experience

While nonprofit groups used to train their own managers, more and more charities have been taking advantage of university education programs, says George Krupanski, president of Boys & Girls Clubs of Delaware, in Wilmington. Some do both: His organization, for example, maintains its own executive-leadership program but has also sent several employees to study fund raising at Indiana University-Purdue University’s Center on Philanthropy, in Indianapolis.

But while alumni and nonprofit employers generally praise academic programs for the skills and connections they can forge — and say they offer evidence of job seekers’ commitment to the field — they also insist such credentials are no substitute for job experience.

Henry R. Maly, a recruiter in Jacksonville, Fla., who conducts searches for nonprofit health-care and education organizations nationwide, says he has advised job candidates to pursue the degrees, but only as a complement to their work histories. “I’m a proponent of additional education, of reading and learning more about the industry and honing one’s skills,” says Mr. Maly. “But, bottom line, when someone is chosen for a position, the degree doesn’t carry the day. It’s the experience and the successful track record. Is it important? Yes, it is. But on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give it a 6 or a 7.”

Price of Professionalization

Some observers of the nonprofit field are also concerned that the increase in academic programs represents a force that could ultimately prove detrimental to the nonprofit world’s focus on its charitable mission.

“There is a price to pay for professionalizing the nonprofit sector, and no one is willing to raise that question,” says William A. Schambra, director of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy & Civic Renewal, which is located in the Washington office of the Hudson Institute, a public-policy think tank in Indianapolis. “The nonprofit sector is the institutionalization of democratic citizenship in America, and that sphere has never been a professional sphere, and I don’t think it should be. This is where everyday citizens try to run their own affairs, using their own talents, without having to go to school, without having to be trained to do it.”

Foundations that insist that grantees have formal management training, he says, simply erect another barrier to grass-roots charities receiving financial support.

Mr. Schambra does not think that formalizing nonprofit-management training will necessarily prevent donations from being mismanaged. “If you can look at the current state of the nonprofit sector and tell me that the money is being wasted by untrained amateurs running little tiny grass-roots groups, if that’s the leakage, then that’s a valid point,” he says. “But is that the leakage? No, it’s not. It’s these enormous nonprofit organizations, it’s the United Ways, it’s all these groups that are large, bureaucratic, that are staffed to the hilt. There’s always this suggestion that it’s these untrained amateurs who are going to Acapulco with the money, but it’s not when you look at the evidence.”

Valuable Lessons

Although nonprofit-management education, with its programs spread across business, public-administration, liberal-arts, and social-work schools, is defined by its variety, much of the field shares a common characteristic — a strong emphasis on grass roots and practicality, says David O. Renz, president of the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council and director of the Midwest Center for Nonprofit Leadership, at the University of Missouri’s Kansas City campus.

Charity managers teach many classes as adjunct faculty members, and students often do internships and projects that send them out into the field. “If you look at the classes, they’re not really classroom-oriented,” Mr. Renz says.

Students apparently want this focus on practical skills. Fifty-five percent of students were employed by nonprofit organizations while taking classes, according to the results of a survey of 160 students and alumni of nonprofit-management programs released in 2002 by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in Battle Creek, Mich.

The respondents rated, in descending order, fund raising, governance, budgeting and accounting, strategic planning, and law as the five most important topics covered in such programs. Students and alumni deemed courses about international charities and their issues least important of all curriculum offerings (The Chronicle, May 2, 2002.)

Even the most cutting-edge academic programs may not fully prepare students for nonprofit management, say employers and educators. Some skills, says Mr. Krupanski, may still be best learned outside the classroom — for example, how to motivate trustees. “It’s easy to understand the structure of how boards function, but you’ve got personalities,” he says. “You’ve got to provide some leadership, as opposed to just management.”

In addition, he says, too many university nonprofit-management classes overemphasize grant-proposal writing when teaching fund raising.

“While grant writing is important,” he says, “most of the dollars in this country come from individuals. There needs to be much more on annual appeals, sustaining memberships, planned giving, tribute funds — all those pieces that are many times not part of a traditional college master’s-degree program.”

Large Charities Left Out

Daniel Nussbaum, director of leadership development at YMCA of the USA, in Chicago, says his group has found that academic programs cannot cover all of its education needs. For instance, he says, all YMCA managers need some training in facilities management, yet very few university curricula include that subject.

Lamech Mbise, vice president of organizational leadership at Junior Achievement, in Colorado Springs, Colo., says that university-based programs do not necessarily teach students how to run large organizations. What’s more, he says, like many other nonprofit groups, his draws an eclectic mix of job candidates, many of them new to the field: retired businesspeople, teachers seeking a career switch, and recent college graduates looking for entry-level positions.

“Given that we really don’t have a consistent way to recruit people and find the skills that we need,” he says, “we had better be prepared to train employees to manage our organization when they come.”

Those, he says, are the reasons that more large charities like his are creating their own in-house leadership-education programs. Mr. Mbise runs the Leadership Academy, an in-house training program that stretches three weeks of instruction over nine months. The program has relied on some courses taught at colleges and faculty members from academic centers, he says, but he has more frequently rejected academic nonprofit-management programs as too basic — and costly — for his group’s needs. “You don’t teach leaders how to raise money,” he says.

Even graduates of university nonprofit-management programs say the field has room for improvement. For instance, Ms. Hodges says, greater emphasis on teaching charities to market themselves and their missions would also be welcome: “There’s always this need to try to soften the businesslike language, and I don’t think that’s necessary.”

Mr. Renz — who would like to see more consistent handling in the curricula of such organizational issues as human resources — says the programs need to keep pace with professionals’ needs.

“One of the challenges of such a young field is that if we don’t keep growing our curriculum and the way we teach this stuff, it can become out-of-date terribly quickly,” he says. “But funding has gotten tighter. It takes significant resources to continue to improve and develop these programs over time.”

Looking to the Future

How those programs will improve and develop is a matter of debate — and finding the money to support that growth has recently become harder.

Both individual donors — such as Morton L. Mandel, the Cleveland businessman for whom Case Western Reserve University’s Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations is named — and large grant makers helped the burgeoning nonprofit-education field grow.

Currently, however, no single national grant maker is taking the lead in supporting these programs. For example, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, in Los Altos, Calif., which had made a priority of supporting nonprofit organizational effectiveness (including academic programs), announced last winter that its declining endowment had led it to slash its giving to those areas. The foundation is no longer making grants to education programs in nonprofit management, says Chris DeCardy, its communications director.

In 2002, the Kellogg Foundation wrapped up its Building Bridges Initiative, through which Kellogg gave $13.5-million over five years to 20 mostly academic institutions in the United States and 8 in Latin America in an effort to tie academic programs and charities closer together, says Katheryn W. Heidrich, president of the CenterPoint Institute, in New Lenox, Ill., a nonprofit consulting group that managed the project. The grant maker has no current plans for a successor to Building Bridges.

The tight financing situation that education programs face, says Ms. Aviv of Independent Sector, may be due partly to the field’s youth: With most academic programs being less than 15 years old, many have not yet had time to produce enough alumni who become major donors, and the discipline itself has not yet fully established its reputation.

Looking ahead, nonprofit educators see needs developing that will require more money and attention. At many institutions, an increasing number of foreign-born students enroll to learn nonprofit skills and put them to work either in the United States or abroad, says Naomi Wish, director of the Center for Public Service at Seton Hall University, who has conducted research on the field. As a result, say Ms. Wish and other educators, programs will need to be altered to accommodate global and diversity issues.

As charities bear the brunt of state budget cuts and declining foundation endowments, more programs will need to add or beef up their classes in social entrepreneurship, says Ms. Wish. “So many of these nonprofits now can’t rely on just government and gifts,” she says.

Advocacy, she says, is another area that she foresees being strengthened in nonprofit-management curricula.

“Because nonprofits have to be very careful about advocacy and lobbying, and the IRS restrictions, students tend to shy away from talking about that,” she says. “Yet, for the visibility of the sector, you need nonprofits banding together.”

The future lies not only in what is being taught, but also in how: Several programs have begun offering online degrees and certificates to meet the needs of busy, far-flung nonprofit professionals. And several institutions are meeting the needs of charities by devising customized executive leadership training for their employees.

And the field keeps growing: A year ago, the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business opened its Center for Responsible Business, which sponsors a Nonprofit and Public Management Club for students.

In October, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities announced the creation of a Center for Leadership of Nonprofits, Philanthropy, and the Public Sector. And this month, Eastern University, in St. Davids, Pa., expands a program offering a master’s of science in nonprofit management to its Philadelphia campus.

Also this month, North Carolina State University begins a pilot course for its proposed undergraduate minor in nonprofit studies, a part of its public-administration major.

The proposed minor, sponsored by a $50,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation, is part of a larger plan by the university’s Institute for Nonprofits, which was created last year thanks to a $1-million grant from the A.J. Fletcher Foundation, in Raleigh, N.C. The institute, which hopes the minor will be approved by the university in the fall, is also considering creating a master’s degree in nonprofit leadership, according to Barbara A. Metelsky, the institute’s director.

Building Knowledge

Ms. Heidrich, of the CenterPoint Institute, says such growth is essential to the success of the nonprofit world.

Nonprofit-management programs on college campuses are “the only places where research is being produced about the nonprofit sector and about nonprofit leadership and management,” says Ms. Heidrich. “And without them, all the nonprofits would be operating only from what they’re able to learn from experience. Which is not to diminish that, but what the universities are doing is building a knowledge base.”

Supporting nonprofit-management education, she says, can make it more likely that a grant maker’s other gifts are not wasted.

“If a foundation really wants to help people — whether they’re hungry or poor or need better health care — one of the ways to do it is to fund these educational programs so that they can train leaders, so that those nonprofits that serve those people are better prepared,” says Ms. Heidrich. “By investing in the preparation of leaders in the field, a foundation can improve its chances of reaching more people who need help.”

What has been your experience with academic nonprofit-management programs? Do you think such credentials help make job seekers more attractive to nonprofit employers? Share your thoughts in the Tools and Training online forum.

For a list of nonprofit-management programs compiled by Seton Hall University, go to: http://pirate.shu.edu/~mirabero/Kellogg.html.

Leah Kerkman and Lara L. McDavit contributed to this article.