Nonprofit Management Education Research Articles

A worthy investment? Investigating alumni perceptions of nonprofit degrees

As students invest in higher education, an assumption of value creation emerges as training and education are expected to yield career and compensation outcomes. Given the growth of nonprofit management education, we see merit in investigating how alumni perceive their degree in terms of the return on their investment of money and time. This study relies on survey data collected from the (project name redacted for anonymity), and joins the Project’s previous findings to elucidate how nonprofit management education is shaping the nonprofit sector’s workforce. Our findings highlight how nonprofit sector commitment, but not work in the sector, influences how graduate alumni view their degree, and that those carrying a higher financial burden from their degree view their degree less favorably. These findings inform administrators of nonprofit degree programs about how students perceive the value of their education and how that perception impacts nonprofit management education as a pipeline for the nonprofit workforce.

Nonprofits into the core? An early assessment of potential curricular changes after the 2019 NASPAA standards amendments

ABSTRACT This article explores the integration of nonprofit content into the MPA core curriculum following NASPAA’s standards amendments in 2019. These amendments underscore the increasing recognition of nonprofit management as a fundamental element of public service education. The analysis examines the evolving landscape of nonprofit education programs and the challenges encountered in integrating nonprofit management into public administration curricula, providing insights into the current state of nonprofit education in MPA programs. It also suggests how programs are proceeding with core integration. Results from a survey of MPA program directors across the United States are presented, revealing a call for ongoing discussions and research to navigate the complexities associated with integrating nonprofit management education into core curricula.

Managerial aspects in macro social work education: comparative analysis between MSW macro programs and nonprofit management education

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to evaluate the scope of management education within macro social work programs in the U.S. and to contrast this with similar nonprofit management education programs across various disciplines. This comparison aims to shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of management education in social work programs. For this purpose, a thorough list of macro-focused MSW degree programs in the U.S. was compiled using the CSWE database. We examined 521 courses from 86 MSW programs with a macro focus. These courses were analyzed and their content compared with that of nonprofit management education programs in other fields. Our findings reveal that while MSW programs in macro practice emphasize personal and interpersonal management skills, they often overlook crucial management tools like fundraising, marketing, philanthropy, and economics. Consequently, it is recommended that social work educators acknowledge the critical managerial competencies needed in social work agencies and incorporate a broader range of subjects to better equip future leaders in the field.

The Challenges and Opportunities of Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Nonprofit Management Education

The complex nature of social issues makes interdisciplinary perspectives an important aspect of current research and education. Nonprofit management education posits itself as a ground for interdisciplinary perspectives as they train future nonprofit leaders who would be at the center of the solution for some of these social issues. While nonprofit management education can gain many benefits from interdisciplinary perspectives, the challenges must be considered and recognized. This paper covers some of the opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinary perspectives in nonprofit management education. The paper concludes with some implications and questions about the practicality of interdisciplinary education.

Residing in the Periphery while Teaching in the Center of Nonprofit Management Education: Perspectives from a Strategic Communication Professor

This essay describes my experiences as a nonprofit management education professor whose academic and professional backgrounds come from strategic communication. I highlight the teaching, service, and research stresses that I’ve experienced as a professor who doesn’t share the same theoretical perspectives as program directors and department chairs who come from public administration, business, and social work backgrounds. I write about these tensions not to vent or air dirty laundry but to encourage nonprofit management education programs to recruit tenured, tenure-track, and adjunct professors who have different backgrounds and actively bring them into key roles within the program in regards to strategic planning, evaluation, and administration.

Two Perspectives on Nonprofit Management Education: Public Administration and Social Work

This special issue of the Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership seeks to help define the distinctiveness of particular disciplines to their understanding of nonprofit organizations and nonprofit education. While the invitation leans toward individual entries, discipline by discipline, this manuscript proposes to develop an explicit “compare and contrast” approach between the disciplines of public administration and social work. Nonprofit management is unequivocally an interdisciplinary field with our understandings drawn from numerous disciplines, among which are public administration and social work. Our compare and contrast approach will enable us and others to begin to understand how our intellectual trajectories, the frames we employ, the very questions we ask, have an impact on the curriculum we develop and teach. This is the premise on which we base the comparative approach embraced in this piece. Knowing that myriads variables could be the foci of our work, we use four parameters in our discussion: the disciplines’ historical roots; key values; challenges in management education within the discipline; and the disciplines’ approach and response to critical perspectives in nonprofit management education (NME). It is through an understanding of how public administration and social work developed along with the key values embraced by each that we can better understand the challenges we face today. We also feel it is important to provide alternative perspectives to traditional approaches, which is why we chose to include a discussion of recent approaches to NME embracing critical understandings.

Enhancing nonprofit organizational capacity: A comparative analysis of an executive master's program in nonprofit management in Saudi Arabia

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs), currently numbering 10 million globally, play a pivotal role in addressing societal needs and promoting inclusivity in development and decision-making. This study delves into the realm of capacity building within NPOs through an examination of an executive master's program in nonprofit management at the University of Ha'il, Saudi Arabia. It scrutinizes program components, demographics, and student motivations, contrasting this distinctive Saudi and Arab context with established global experiences. This research underscores the strengths of the nonprofit sector, particularly its contributions to community service and job satisfaction. It suggests the potential expansion of such educational initiatives and advocates for increased female participation. Employing a descriptive research design and qualitative methods, the study offers a comprehensive analysis of program content, faculty, and student experiences. Through targeted interviews and specialized literature reviews, the research critically evaluates the program's design, implementation, and impact, informing future enhancements. Comparative analysis with prior research underscores the significance of the Executive Master's Program in Nonprofit Management in preparing professionals for Saudi Arabia's nonprofit sector. Non-financial motivations emerge as crucial in talent acquisition and retention, with key success factors revealed through program analysis, informing nonprofit management education regionally. The study's findings have profound implications for NPOs, policymakers, and educational institutions in Saudi Arabia. Emphasis is placed on strategies focusing on non-financial incentives and professional development. Moreover, the study serves as a blueprint for designing similar programs in neighboring countries, cultivating a dynamic nonprofit sector and a skilled workforce for positive social transformation. Recommendations include expanding nonprofit management education, promoting women's participation, addressing local challenges, integrating global best practices, and catering to diverse professional needs through scholarships, mentorship, and networking opportunities, fostering inclusivity within the sector.

Beyond 501(c)(3)s Third Sector/Social Economy Classifications for Nonprofit Management Education

Until recently, nonprofit and third sector classifications have been an underexplored subject area in nonprofit management education. This research area has significantly evolved in the last few years merging American with European and other international perspectives. This article examines the organizational characteristics identifying nonprofit-social with nonprofit institutions (NPIs) and extended by third sector/social economy (TSE) institutions. Professor Lester Salamon1 substantially advanced the classifications of hybrid organizations which led to the 2018 Handbook on Nonprofit Satellite Accounts and the Third Sector Impact Project. This work represents the first steps in aligning American perspectives of charity and nonprofit institutions with European social enterprise and social economy perspectives regarding the third sector and social economy. The organizational characteristics and principles for nonprofit/third sector classifications are compared in relation to their effects on social economic solutions and nonprofit management education.

Critical Thinking in Nonprofit Management Education Is an Explicit Emphasis Related to Greater Skill Development?

Critical thinking is a core skill for nonprofit managers. Teaching for critical thinking is effective in improving students’ critical thinking; however, the pedagogy must be contextualized to various domains. This quasi-experimental study explored the contextualization of critical thinking skill development in two identical nonprofit management education (NME) courses. The research questions were: a) what is the critical thinking disposition of undergraduate NME students?, and b) does an explicit pedagogical focus on critical thinking in NME lead to increased capacity to exercise critical thinking skills? Findings suggest that an explicit focus on critical thinking was related to improved skill performance. Statistically significant differences were found for four of the six critical thinking skills. The change in skill performance may be a combination of both motivation and skill change, both of which benefit from an explicit focus on critical thinking.

Utilizing Critical Perspectives in Nonprofit Management Education: Implementation and Insights From an Online Course

This study investigated the effects of utilizing critical pedagogy and perspectives in a course on nonprofit management. A description of the course and assessment approach is provided, followed by the results of a series of surveys and student reflections gathered from students electing to participate in this research project. Quantitative and qualitative results are presented from the various data collection tools, with insights into how each collection tool tells a unique story. The qualitative data provide insights into student engagement with the material and their appreciation for an alternative approach to learning how to manage nonprofit organizations.

Preparing Nonprofit Professionals: An Educational Needs Assessment from a Worker Perspective

Nonprofit management education is informed by curricular standards and feedback from students and alumni on the utility of its curriculum components. In a professionalizing and diverse nonprofit sector, we were curious to ask nonprofit workers about the skills and competencies they need for their work. Applying a survey design, we asked nonprofit workers about the skills and abilities they used in their work relative to general professional and nonprofit curricular standards. In our findings, we explore differences according to the professional profiles to make sense of the sector’s diverse workforce. Our assessment supplies fresh insight into the competencies nonprofit education promotes, describing how nonprofit professionals view the skills needed for their work, and how they think about professional development. The findings inform those who teach or administer nonprofit degree programs, as well as those who work or want to work in the nonprofit sector.

Nonprofit Management Education in Taiwan

Nonprofit management education has grown exponentially worldwide. In Taiwan, in response to the rapid growth of the nonprofit sector, universities are increasingly offering nonprofit courses and programs that train students interested in this area to gain relevant occupational capabilities. We asked the following questions. 1) Which nonprofit courses and programs are offered in Taiwan?, 2) What are the characteristics of nonprofit management education in Taiwan?, and 3) Where are the identified nonprofit courses and programs situated? To explore the nonprofit courses and programs provided by higher education institutions in Taiwan, we in turn built the first database of nonprofit courses and programs offered in Taiwan. We discovered 681 courses offered at 104 universities and 38 nonprofit management-related programs offered at 26 universities from 2018 to 2019.

Recognizing the Plural Sector: Nonprofit Studies in a Business School Environment

The “best place” debate centers on which disciplinary setting is best for degree programs in nonprofit management education. We contribute to the discussion by reflecting on the constraints and opportunities intentionally identified in a developing program within an established business school. We ground our work in the nonprofit sector’s interdependence with the market and public sectors, and identify opportunities for reciprocity within a business school setting. Finally, we identify cultivating interdisciplinary relationships as a strategy to ameliorate tension between a competitive vs. collaborative “forced choice” approach.

Editors' Notes on Themed Issue on Civil Society Education: East Asia

This is the fourth themed issue in the Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership (JNEL) in which researchers around the world examine regional and national training and education programs for individuals with civil society leadership roles. The issue has its origin in a post-conference airport meeting a few years ago between one of the editors of this series of themed issues and a set of prominent scholars from East Asia. As most researchers would confirm, the value of a research conference is seldom found in the various seminars or panels, but rather in the unplanned encounters that take place at breakfast, over a coffee, or—in this case—at the airport. The mere airport happenstance turned out to be the beginning of several valuable research initiatives. Since then, among other things, the authors and the editors have met and organized public disseminations, including the Nonprofit Higher Education Research Summit at he ISTR International Conference in 2021. The overall result is not only a significant contribution to the series of themed issues, but also, and more importantly, the first mapping of programs in nonprofit and nongovernmental management education in East Asia.

Course concept understanding and skill transfer as correlates of intent to recommend an experiential MBA non-profit governance course

The growth of non-profit organizations has led to a proliferation of non-profit management education (NME) courses across different curricula. We use survey data from a two-semester NME course with a substantive board service requirement to investigate what affects students’ intent to recommend an NME course to other MBA students. Drawing 65 responses from predominantly MBA students who had completed the course between 2011 and 2018, we found that course concept understanding and skill transfer affected students’ intent to recommend. Implications for practice are discussed.

The Dissonance of “Doing Good”: Fostering Critical Pedagogy to Challenge the Selective Tradition of Nonprofit Management Education

Nonprofit management classrooms are filled with students who yearn to “do good” in the world and yet, in practice, they confront a dissonance between their vision of doing good and the realities of nonprofit work. This dissonance is in part created by contemporary nonprofit management education (NME) through the development and perpetuation of a selective historical tradition of the nonprofit sector which mythologizes the sector and its work. These traditions and myths of the nonprofit sector are based squarely in white American and Eurocentric values and downplay the histories of people of color and thus perpetuate whiteness as central to nonprofit norms and practice. We present a critical reading of these histories in an effort to help educators and students reclaim and reimagine the histories of the nonprofit sector and offer tenets of a critical pedagogy that emphasizes historical consciousness and a praxis of emancipation so that nonprofit educators and students can re-envision nonprofit theory and practice in the future.

Building Nonprofit Management Education in the US: The Role of Centers in Supporting New Academic Disciplines

Nonprofit and philanthropic studies (NPS) is a visible presence at American universities and has achieved academic credibility. This study analyzes the role of academic centers devoted to the nonprofit sector in institutionalizing NPS as a distinctive academic field. It relies on a survey and selected case studies to map nonprofit academic centers and assess their field-building efforts. We find 55 US-based nonprofit academic centers that vary in size, revenue streams, and institutional location. Centers offer a broad range of services that span academia and practice supporting the local and regional nonprofit communities. Both endogenous and exogenous factors supported the founding of these centers, whose sustainability relies on interdisciplinarity, internal and external funding, and institutional support. We propose an evolutionary explanation for NPS’s institutionalization.

Building Nonprofit Management Education in the US: The Role of Centers in Supporting New Academic Disciplines

Building Nonprofit Management Education in the US: The Role of Centers in Supporting New Academic Disciplines

Sector Distinctiveness v. Cross-Sector Commonalities: Are There Qualitative Differences in Graduate Nonprofit Management Education Offered Through Public Service and Business Programs in the United Kingdom?

Previous research on nonprofit management education (NME) in the United Kingdom (UK) has raised the question of whether NME provided through public service departments will focus more on third sector distinctiveness, while NME provided through business schools will concentrate more on general, cross-sector management skills. We collect data on courses offered within UK graduate degree programs with an NME concentration and compare them using Mirabella’s (2007) taxonomy and find that there is more commonality than differences between graduate NME offered in both business and public service programs in the UK. However, statistically significant differences in the provision of courses as a proportion of total curriculum do exist for courses related to “advocacy, public policy, and community organizing,” “financial management,” and “social enterprise.”

Assessing Philanthropic Impact: How the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Building Bridges Initiative Supported the Field of Philanthropic and Nonprofit Studies

In the 1990s, nonprofit management education was an emerging discipline with few established academic centers seeking to increase connectivity, build out the field, and gain financial sustainability. While organized philanthropy supported this development, foundations’ impact on individual programs and the field more broadly is unclear.