Master's programme tackles priority issues
Postgraduate politics and sociology programmes are tackling issues that are increasingly becoming public policy priorities for governments: the environment, pollution and public security, health care, heritage preservation and development, and infrastructure.
At City University, most of the students taking the two-year part-time master's in public policy and management are in full-time employment, said Brian Brewer, associate professor in the faculty of humanities and social sciences, department of public and social administration. The majority of them work for the Hong Kong government while others work in public organisations such as the Hospital Authority or in administrative positions in universities and other institutions.
Admissions to the City University master's programme last year were as follows: government civilian officers and members of the disciplined services (59 per cent); public organisations (5 per cent); social service organisations (5 per cent); private sector (11 per cent); unemployed/full-time students (11 per cent); and the education sector (9 per cent).
The master's degree is a two-year part-time programme with a summer semester between the first and second years. Students study several courses including the theories of government and public administration, values and choice in public and social policy, human resources management, public budgeting and management of financial resources, and the nature of public policy development. They are also introduced to research methodology in a course intended to help them prepare for their dissertation or capstone project.
At the end of the first semester, a special feature of the programme sees the students pursue a residential session outside Hong Kong. In recent years, this has taken place in Singapore, where the students engage in several exercises and comparative work.
'We choose a number of policy issues and direct students to look at how they are managed in Hong Kong compared with Singapore. We ask the students to look into the future and identify the important public policy issues that will have to be addressed by government,' Professor Brewer said.
One of the latest developments with the City University master's programme is to allow students to complete it in one year on a full-time basis. 'We want to make it available to students who want to do a master's full time. The first year we offered it full time we had two students and this past year we had four students; several of them from mainland China.
'We would like to get more students enrolled on this basis. We think it will provide us with a link to more applicants from the mainland,' Professor Brewer said.
A similar programme through Lingnan University's department of politics and sociology is offered to students as a research degree rather than a taught course. But students must take a one-term course in research methodology and training that introduces them to the philosophy of social science research and also methods of how to co-ordinate their research questions and hypotheses.
'This course has a very practical emphasis in terms of preparing them for their two-year MPhil or three-year PhD studies,' said Brian Bridges, a professor of politics in the department and associate director of the university's Centre for Asian-Pacific Studies.
Lingnan's political science department has particular strengths in Chinese and Hong Kong politics and in international relations in the Asia-Pacific region. Professor Bridges, for example, is a specialist in Korea and Japan and the department has further expertise in Southeast Asia and environmental politics.
'What makes our MPhil different is that we are part of an integrated social science programme so there is close communication between the students in all the social sciences,' he said. 'They may be doing a master's that is predominantly political science, but they have close contact with MPhil students doing sociology and economics.
'We think this interaction across disciplines helps the students get greater depth and understanding of the topics they are working on and to produce a better thesis as a result,' Professor Bridges said. 'We're teaching them skills in terms of their writing that will be useful for them in future employment.'
Cyrus Lee is a postgraduate student at Lingnan and is studying Sino-Japanese relationships in security issues. He will graduate this year with an MPhil in Social Sciences. He said that he chose the course because writing a thesis was a personal challenge for him and because the programme covered more areas than similar programmes available in Hong Kong. 'Lingnan's master's programme is more integrated compared to other universities in Hong Kong,' he said. 'The social sciences programme is composed of three departments and the professors provide a broader range of education that is simply harder to get elsewhere. This was suitable for me because I wanted to study a broader range of information.'
