WASHINGTON, June 27 (UPI) -- The largest doctoral program in policy analysis in the United States held its commencement on June 22 -- nine students graduated. These newly minted Ph.D.s look forward to careers in academia, government, industry, non-profit organizations and think tanks, where they will provide high-level analyses of the nation's problems and generate the ideas that will become national policy.
The event was unusual because it took place not at a university, but at an independent think tank, the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif. In fact, the fully accredited RAND Graduate School, known as RGS, is the nation's only doctoral program in policy analysis based at a think tank.
Founded in 1970, RGS is one of the original eight American graduate programs in public policy. Other leading programs are at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Texas.
The RAND school also takes a unique approach to the curriculum, adding extensive on-the-job training to the academic coursework -- which includes advanced economics, statistics, and modeling techniques, as well as the social and behavioral sciences. Each doctoral candidate serves as a part-time member of the RAND Corp.'s interdisciplinary research teams, working on projects connected with their research.
Each student, or fellow, earns his or her fellowship by serving on these research teams. At any particular time, these teams are working on more than 500 projects on topics including education, science, labor policy, and international security.
RGS admits about 20 new fellows annually. The students, whose average age is 26, come from all over the world. Usually, they already possess a master's degree or doctorate; occasionally, however, the school accepts someone with only a bachelor's degree.
Admission depends not just on academic scores but also on creativity; the school's Web site says RGS seeks students "with a combination of passion and discipline -- the passion to change the world for the better, and the discipline to carry forth the new research that will be needed to do so."
Or, as RGS Dean Robert Klitgaard put it in an interview with United Press International, the school combines a "very adventurous spirit" with "great rigor." "The out-of-the-box thinking is very important to us," he said.
Klitgaard compared the RGS culture to that of his alma mater, Harvard University, where he has also taught at the Kennedy School of Government. "The difference at RAND, I think, is that your colleagues have more time," he said. At Harvard, professors are booked with bureaucratic duties, such as committee meetings, he said.
He also described the RGS atmosphere as having "more of a software company feel," with a very flat bureaucracy. Klitgaard sees his job as helping people connect rather than overseeing paperwork -- facilitating collaboration among faculty and students.
The dean said that RGS has avoided many of the problems typically associated with Ph.D. programs in the United States. Citing a University of Washington study, "Re-envisioning the Ph.D.," Klitgaard noted that the emphasis on applied research at RGS helps the program avoid charges of lack of relevance. Also, unlike many Ph.D. programs, RGS graduates have a strong track record in finding employment.
Past graduates have included top leaders in business and government in the United States and around the world. Kenneth E. Thorpe, a 1985 graduate who holds a chair in health policy and management at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, served in the Clinton administration as a deputy assistant secretary of Health and Human Services.
Philip Romero, a 1988 graduate, is dean of the University of Oregon's Charles H. Lundquist College of Business. He previously worked as a corporate strategist for United Technology Corp. and also served as a top economic advisor to former California Gov. Pete Wilson.
Turkish business leader Yilmaz Arguden, who was at RAND in the early 1980s, has held top economic positions in his country's government. He served as vice chairman of privatization during the late 1980s, and in the early 1990s became the prime minister's chief economic advisor.
Asked if RGS might be a prototype for other Ph.D. programs in public policy, Klitgaard said it would be difficult to reproduce RAND's model. "Maybe it's an accident that it happened as it did," he said. "You'd have to say to yourself, is it worth it?" The cost of establishing such a program today would be high, he said, because too much competition exists now.
The only other U.S. think tank to have offered a graduate degree in public policy is the Washington-based Brookings Institution, which had a program more than 70 years ago. According to Colin Johnson, a media relations officer at Brookings, the institution began an accredited graduate school in 1924, offering a degree in Public Service. Johnson did not know why Brookings shut down the program, which ended sometime in the 1930s. But he explained that this historical connection partly explains why Brookings' Web address, www.brookings.edu, includes the ".edu" extension, which is usually reserved for educational institutions.
Johnson noted that both RAND and Brookings are among the very few think tanks not associated with a university, which still focus strictly on research rather than on advocacy. "In (Washington), 'think tank' in a traditional sense is become more and more colloquial," he said. "More (of them) are becoming advocacy groups rather than (pursuing) pure research."
And both RGS and Brookings focus on a broad array of topics, he said, rather than emphasizing only a few issues.
Like Klitgaard, Johnson believes it would not be easy to reproduce the RGS graduate school model, largely because of competition. Brookings is one of the few think tanks with sufficient size, stature, and financial resources to do it if it wished to. Because of its substantial private endowments, Johnson said, Brookings is also able to maintain its academic independence and not be beholden to a single stakeholder patron.
Currently, Brookings does not offer degree programs but focuses its educational efforts on holding public policy seminars aimed at more general audiences, including the corporate world.
"I don't think anyone doubts the power and intellectual rigor of what they produce," said Tom G. Palmer of RGS. Palmer is a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and director of the Washington-based think tank's "Cato University," which offers public seminars on economics, history, and American constitutional government, but doesn't offer degree programs.
Palmer collaborated with RAND scholars in the 1970s on the issue of whether the U.S. military should go to an All-Volunteer Force, and highly praised the quality of RAND/RGS research.
The Cato scholar compared the RGS model to the certification offered by software firms such as Novell and Microsoft. These rigorous courses produce people who are truly competent in a skill, he said. Palmer said of the RGS program: "The doctorate that they award is not primarily motivated toward teaching other people," but rather about learning the practical skills of policy analysis. This makes RGS Ph.D.s different from other doctoral students, most of whom intend to enter university teaching.
Like Klitgaard and Johnson, Palmer believes it would be difficult to reproduce the RGS model at other think tanks. RAND had a large advantage when it established RGS in the early 1970s, he said, because of its existing reputation for intellectual rigor and its connections with the U.S. Department of Defense. "There're a really serious barrier to entry in a field like this," Palmer said.
