Public Affairs
Bachelor of Science
Quick Facts
Top 3%
Online Bachelor's
Program in the Nation
- U.S. News & World Report, 2025
Top 25
in the nation, Public
Management & Leadership
- U.S. News & World Report, 2020
In the Public Affairs major, you will cultivate expertise that prepares you for managerial and administrative positions in local, state or federal government and nonprofit agencies. Enter a field with the potential to increase public access to essential government services.
Understanding the nature of public policy, the public workplace and its political, legal and managerial implementations will enhance your professional leadership skills and unlock career opportunities at various government service levels. This major will also build your foundational knowledge for graduate study in law, specialized planning or public administration.
Online students pursuing a degree in Public Affairs must complete an internship and may choose between an online or in-person internship opportunity.
*Residents of some U.S. Territories may not be eligible. Please see our Eligibility & State Authorization page for more information.
Students must complete the following introductory courses (15 units), major core courses (12 units), a public management and policy emphasis (15 units) and an internship (3 units).
This is an introductory course in the fundamentals of modern statistics with applications and examples in the social and behavioral sciences. Topics include: methods for describing and summarizing data, probability, random sampling, estimating population parameters, significance tests, contingency tables, simple linear regression, and correlation.
Explore theory and practice of executive agencies, including policy making and other functions, processes, personnel and fiscal management, and administrative law.
This course is a general survey of the constitutional bases, organization, and functioning of the American national government; recent and current trends.
This course is required for public administration students and is four parts. The first section is devoted to the context of ethics in the public and non-profit sectors. Most of the course will be devoted to the learners resolving ethical dilemmas in criminal justice organizations, health and human services organizations and government generally. The final section will examine larger issues in the civic culture.
In this course, students will examine issues and techniques of financial management and budgeting in the public and nonprofit sectors.
This course is an exploration of public organization theory and behavior in the context of issues confronting upper echelon public administrators on local, state and federal levels.
Students will learn about the needs and demands for public action on policy issues; organization and nature of political support; processes and problems of decision making in the formation of public policy at the national, state, and local levels.
This course covers analysis and discussion of social, economic, and political problems and proposed solutions in changing urban environments.
Outcomes
Skills
Earning your Bachelor of Science in Public Affairs will build core skills, including:
- Administrative reform
- Budgeting and financial management
- Formation of public policy
- Human resource management
- Leadership and ethics
- Organizational and inter-organizational management
- Policy implementation and evaluation
- Program evaluation
Potential Career Paths
Many of our graduates have attained positions in local, state, and federal government agencies, nonprofit organizations, political campaigns and offices and private businesses. Our graduates have also gone on to attain advanced degrees in law, public policy, sociology, public administration, social work and political science.
A major in Bachelor of Science in Public Affairs will help you qualify for many different careers in public, nonprofit, and private sectors, including:
