Essential Skills for Financial Management: Are MPA Students Acquiring the Necessary Competencies?

Abstract

Recent surveys indicate that professional managers rank financial skills high among critical management skills. For example, some 2,000 local government managers judged budgeting/finance skills to be the most important management skill by a 2-to-1 margin.' Again, a survey of 588 graduates of 12 MPA programs also found that graduates judged budgeting and finance course work to be the most relevant in their curriculum. 2 As McCaffery concluded in a previous analysis of public budgeting courses, it would seem that a fiscal crisis of some magnitude has existed long enough that all future public managers ought to be introduced to budgeting.I The purpose of this paper is to report on the extent to which MPA programs currently teach essential financial management skills in the course work required of all MPA candidates. It does not examine the curriculum of that minority of MPA students who elect to specialize in financial management. We first consider the total amount of course work that MPA candidates generally complete and then compare the content of this course work to those skills that practitioners believe are essential. Given the importance of financial management skills and the requirement by the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration that these skills be included in the MPA curriculum, how much course work does the typical MPA student get? A recent survey of MPA programs4 indicates that, while 98 percent offer at least one course in financial management, 19 percent do so on an elective instead of a required basis. Of the remaining 79 percent which require students to take such course work to obtain the degree, 61 percent require one course, 14 percent require two, and 4 percent require three or more courses. The typical MPA candidate, then, completes a single course in financial management.5