Increasingly, public officials at all levels of government are demanding more rigorous, data-driven analytics to support the critical decisions that they are called upon to make. These quantitative tools can be quite powerful, offering insights that can make a difference between the success or failure of a particular public policy or program. However, all too often, these officials have to look elsewhere for the expertise to conduct such analyses…until now.
To address this demand, the University of South Florida’s School of Public Affairs is pleased to offer a new, cutting-edge graduate certificate program on Data Science for Public Administration. One of the first of its kind in the US, it is designed to prepare current and prospective public and non-profit sector professionals and degree-seeking MPA and Urban and Regional Planning graduate students who wish to enhance their quantitative and analytic skills. The certificate includes two required core courses and a minimum of three electives selected from the list of courses below, for a total of 15 semester hours:
- Required Courses: Quantitative Analysis for Public Managers; and Fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems, both offered by the School of Public Affairs.
- Elective Courses include: Information Analytics; Visualization of Big Data; People Analytics; Data Analytics for Business; Data Mining; and Introduction to Social Network Analysis.
All electives are offered in partnership with the School of Information Sciences and the Department of Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences in the Muma College of Business.
This exciting new program will equip public sector practitioners and graduate students to understand and apply advanced quantitative and analytic tools from a variety of different disciplines to today’s complex public and non-profit management challenges. For more information, please refer to our Web site or contact our two Data Science Certificate Program Coordinators, Assistant Professor Shinwoo Lee (shinwoolee@usf.edu) and Visiting Research Professor Steven Fernandez (slfernandez@usf.edu) directly.
