January 8, 2004 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Programs in nonprofit management began gathering momentum on campuses in the early 1980s, but their explosive
growth in the past decade was triggered by changes in the philanthropic world as well as by trends rippling through American society.
The rapid growth has not been without its costs. Such programs are not overseen by an accrediting body that can ensure a college’s nonprofit curriculum meets certain basic academic standards. Now, however, as the field matures, new efforts are under way to make it easier to evaluate nonprofit-management programs.
The sheer number of charities — and the increasing demands by foundations and other donors that grantees demonstrate efficiency and fiscal responsibility — are probably the most significant reasons academic programs are blossoming. However, David O. Renz, president of the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council and director of the Midwest Center for Nonprofit Leadership, at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, says another reason is that in the past decade many young people were exposed early to charities through community-service requirements that school districts have adopted. Their previous volunteerism, coupled with the state of the world since September 11, 2001, he says, has intensified young people’s interest in serving society.
Today’s civic-minded students may be more inclined than previous generations to work for charities, says Debra Mesch, director of graduate programs at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Baby boomers, she notes, were more likely to express their social consciences via government work, but the current generation is more likely to reject that field as too bureaucratic. And the shift in sensibility, she says, is showing up mostly in public-administration schools.
Those institutions were among the first places where nonprofit management began to thrive as an academic field, says Naomi Wish, director of the Center for Public Service at Seton Hall University.
In the 1980s, enrollments at public-administration schools began to dip as a result of government budget cutbacks, which, she suggests, made the field less attractive to young people. However, she says, during the same era, an increasing percentage of students in these graduate schools came from nonprofit groups.
Under the guidance of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, colleges began to develop programs that taught nonprofit-specific skills to serve these students. (Some graduate programs grew out of existing undergraduate certificate programs run by American Humanics, an organization in Kansas City, Mo., according to Kala M. Stroup, American Humanics’ leader.) In 1998, Ms. Wish and a fellow Seton Hall University researcher, Roseanne M. Mirabella, looked back to 1990 and surveyed the graduate nonprofit-management programs offered then. They found only 17; today there are more than 90.
Organizing the Field
As student demand grew, so did the supply of teachers. The number of researchers from many disciplines — business, social work, law — who study the nonprofit field reached a critical mass in academe.
Efforts are under way to organize the academic field. In November, the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council, an umbrella group in Washington for nonprofit centers at colleges and universities, unveiled its new curriculum guidelines for nonprofit-management programs. Developed with a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the guidelines cover 13 topic areas, including ethics, nonprofit governance, financial management, fund raising, information technology, and the history of philanthropy.
Pamela Leland, director of the Community Resource Center at the University of Delaware and chairwoman of the council’s curriculum task force, says she hopes that the guidelines will give educators a standard by which to measure their programs — and help enhance their credibility within their universities.
“As a fairly new field, it is still searching for stability of resources and institutional commitment,” she says. “Nonprofit-center directors and faculty can take this document to their colleagues and say, ‘Look, this is a field of study that covers these kind of things — it warrants our involvement and deserves our attention, and our students want it.’”
Even with the new guidelines, programs on nonprofit management may continue to find themselves fighting for respect in academe, says Katheryn W. Heidrich, president of the CenterPoint Institute, in New Lenox, Ill., a nonprofit consulting group.
“Many of these programs are on the margins of their universities,” Ms. Heidrich says. “They are often where the community can connect with the university, or they’re on the margins of some academic field, so they’re not central to something like economics or law, some of the more traditional disciplines. And so since they’re on the margins, they have great assets: They can be flexible, they can be responsive to the needs of the nonprofit sector. But they also pay a price by being on the margins, unless they’re tightly connected to the missions of their universities.”
