Stanford’s Public-Management Program Emphasizes Social Responsibility

January 8, 2004 | Read Time: 10 minutes

Eric Westendorf wanted to start a school. A former assistant principal and middle-school teacher, Mr. Westendorf

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first set his sights on getting a doctorate in education. “But the more I looked into that,” he says, “the more I realized that would make me a stronger academic but wasn’t necessarily going to give me the skills I needed to be a strong organizational leader.”

As he pondered his next step a couple of years ago, he says, he was swayed by the entreaties of friends with similar backgrounds in education who had recently entered a master’s of business administration program: It was about leadership and management, they told him, as much as it was about the for-profit world.

He was convinced. This year, he will complete a master’s of business administration at Stanford University — and earn a certificate through the public-management program, which emphasizes social responsibility and the nonprofit world.

“It was clear to me that the spirit of the PMP pervaded the culture at Stanford,” says Mr. Westendorf. “When I talked to folks and told them my background, they were curious and interested as opposed to questioning why someone like myself would want to go to business school.”

Rapid Growth

Stanford’s Graduate Business School has a long history of embracing students who see their futures in charities — or who simply aspire to apply socially conscious values to their for-profit careers.

The university’s 16-credit public-management certificate program, which was founded in 1971, requires that students complete certain courses in one of four areas — general public management, nonprofit management, social entrepreneurship, or public policy — with the option of further specializing within the areas of nonprofit management, government, or socially responsible business. Students have up to 30 courses to choose from under the program’s umbrella. The certificate can be earned within Stanford’s intensive, full-time, two-year 100-credit master’s of business administration program.

The certificate program has grown rapidly in popularity: Stanford awarded 18 of the credentials to business-school graduates in 2000, and gave out 92 certificates to them last year.

“The program isn’t just designed for students who want to get a full-time job in the nonprofit sector when they graduate,” says Peggy Reid, the public-management program’s director. “There are lots of people who are just aware and socially minded and want to figure out how they can contribute in a meaningful way, even if they’re going to go to [the for-profit consultant] McKinsey when they graduate.” Most students, she says, take jobs in the business world after graduation, but the program is intended to give them the tools they need to integrate their social concerns into their paid and volunteer work, wherever it may take them. “We’re indifferent, really, to the sector,” she says.

Membership’s Privileges

The program maintains a plethora of clubs, committees, and activities, allowing business students to get involved to varying degrees without necessarily committing to the certificate program. While one-quarter of all business graduates earned the certificate last year, Stanford officials report, 55 percent of all business students are “members” of the program, via their participation in individual courses, clubs, workshops, international study trips, or special events.

“Stanford has done an exceptional job at not marginalizing the PMP, but rather taking it and putting a focus on it,” says Monica Brand, who received master’s degrees in business and education from Stanford in 1997.

Ms. Brand, who is senior director for marketing and product development in the Washington office of Acción International, a nonprofit microlending organization with headquarters in Boston, has hired Stanford public-management program alumni.

“I’ve met people who have been active in PMP without getting the certificate,” she says. “They’ve integrated the program such that its activities and focus can touch the whole student body.”

Students drive every aspect of the program, says Ms. Reid — creating classes, inviting speakers, sponsoring conferences, and founding clubs. “Basically, when students get to Stanford, if they don’t see the thing that they want to participate in, they create it,” she says. Students run 10 clubs devoted to such interest areas as the environment, local economic development, and education for disadvantaged children.

One club started by students, Board Fellows, matches business students with Bay Area charities, enabling fellows to serve eight months as apprentice trustees. Mr. Westendorf, for example, served on the board of Leadership for Public Schools, a nonprofit group that has just opened the first of 25 charter schools — independent institutions sponsored by public-school systems but run by parents, educators, and others — it plans to create in the Bay Area. The public-management program’s focus on student involvement, he says, feeds its educational mission: “It’s a tremendous opportunity to be both promoting public leadership and practicing it at the same time.”

The Stanford Brand

Stanford’s overall reputation, some alumni say, may be the key factor in the quality of their education and career prospects, drawing top-drawer professors, campus speakers, and classmates.

Alumni say that the network they can assemble at Stanford may be the biggest benefit of all. “What I got out of it was a group of peers who were focused, thoughtful, accomplished individuals, regardless of whether they went into the private sector or the public sector, who supported me then and continue to support me now,” says Jacqueline Novogratz, a 1991 graduate who heads the Acumen Fund, a New York grant maker that she founded to support efforts to end global poverty.

The business school works to forge links between students and graduates in a number of ways, says Ms. Reid, such as the Future Alumni Consulting Team, in which students and alumni work together in offering pro bono consulting to local charities.

The fact that the public-management program is housed in an acclaimed business program also makes a difference, alumni say.

Stanford’s M.B.A. program was ranked second — just behind Harvard — in U.S. News & World Report’s most recent survey of graduate programs, and Stanford was named one of six business programs “on the cutting edge” in a survey last year by the Aspen Institute and the World Resource Institute.

The business degree, says Ms. Brand, may prove more useful in a day-to-day context for nonprofit leaders than the public-management certificate. The business course work, she says, helps students understand how to maximize limited financial and human resources — a necessity for all charity managers — and the public-management curriculum helps them translate those principles for nonprofit employees who are driven by mission rather than money.

“It helped prepare me to make arguments of human-resource management and efficiency to people who aren’t working with that kind of perspective,” she says.

The university has taken steps in recent years to solidify its position as an academic center for public-management research.

Three years ago, Stanford opened the Center for Social Innovation, which houses the public-management program and studies ways to apply business solutions to social and environmental problems. Among its projects is the journal it began publishing last year, Stanford Social Innovation Review, which Ms. Reid calls “sort of the Harvard Business Review of the social sector.”

Job Searching

With fewer than 10 percent of its business-school students going into nonprofit work after graduation, Stanford should work harder to funnel more of its graduates into charity jobs, according to some observers.

“There’s still a sense that going into nonprofit is kind of wasting your M.B.A., that it’s not as sexy as going to work for Goldman Sachs,” Ms. Brand says.

Other alumni, however, say that notion misses the point of the public-management program.

For instance, Daniel Grossman had never served on a nonprofit board until he participated in the Board Fellows program. Today, he serves on the boards of several children’s and Jewish charities while running Wild Planet Toys, a for-profit company in San Francisco he founded two years after receiving his M.B.A. and public-management certificate in 1991. Citing the interest in a “double bottom line” in today’s business world — profits plus a commitment to social responsibility — Mr. Grossman says that Stanford’s public-management program has broad appeal among prospective students.

“Whether students wind up in the nonprofit sector or not doesn’t really matter,” he says, “because they will come out with a commitment to volunteering and social responsibility.”

Claire E. Alexander, a self-described “sector hopper” who expects to complete her business degree in June and has taken some public-management courses, has worked for nonprofit organizations and is aiming for a career as a television executive. Although she says she was shopping for a business curriculum when she applied to Stanford, the public-management program was a key factor in her decision to enroll.

“I would love to have a career that’s not limited by sector, where I can be useful and giving back wherever I am, be it for-profit, nonprofit, or government,” she says. “And the nice thing about this program is, I have exposure to all those things.”

The business school has tried to make it easier for debt-ridden students to work for the relatively low salaries charities offer compared with business. The Stanford Management Internship Fund — now supported by the Graduate Business School, but started by students who donated up to 2 percent of their salaries at for-profit internships to the cause — subsidizes internship salaries for students who work for nonprofit groups.

In addition, the university pays back student loans in renewable six-month increments for business graduates who accept government or charity jobs, and work at least half-time in those jobs for the full six months. (Ms. Brand says she was able to accept her current nonprofit employer’s offer over another, from McKinsey & Company, because of Stanford’s loan-forgiveness program.)

The breadth of knowledge that an M.B.A. can bring to a charity can be tremendously beneficial to nonprofit employers, especially small, sparsely staffed organizations, says Jonathan C. Abbott, class of 1988, who has hired other Stanford business graduates in his job as vice president and general manager of television stations at WGBH, the public-broadcasting group in Boston.

A business-school graduate, he says, can help a charity devote time and labor to large-scale research projects that can alter its strategic planning. Years ago, when Mr. Abbott worked at the San Francisco public-broadcasting station KQED, he hired a Stanford M.B.A. graduate who did an analysis of the giving by the station’s donors over five years.

“To do that, you need to be able to manage a spreadsheet pretty darned well,” he notes. The project changed the way the station conducted its fund raising, teaching it how to acquire and keep donors more efficiently. “It was a pretty seminal project,” he says, “and we ended up publishing it and sharing it with other stations around the country.”

And business-school alumni are likely to get a lot out of working for charities, he says.

“Unlike going to an investment bank or a consulting firm where they have legions of M.B.A.’s, where you have this cohort of people who are just like you, more often than not, when you go to join a ballet company, or a social-service agency, or an environmental group, or a public broadcaster, you’re unique,” he says. “We’re all looking for things in our careers where we can make a difference and add value. And it’s exciting to bring these skills and see what we can add to these nonprofit organizations.”

Lara L. McDavit provided additional reporting for this article.

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Program: Master of business administration, with public-management-program certificate

Offered by: Graduate Business School

Location: Stanford, Calif.

Number of enrolled students: 761 (all M.B.A. candidates)

Number of public-management certificates awarded in 2003: 92 of 362 M.B.A. recipients

Average number of students admitted each year: Not available

Percentage of students who apply who enroll: 7

Tuition costs: $36,252 (annual)

Percentage of students who receive financial aid: 51

Percentage who attend full time: 100