World Class Cities Partnership Capstone Class

Northeastern University
School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs

PPUA 6966: Practicum in Urban and Regional Policy
PPUA7673: Master of Urban and Regional Policy Capstone 

The Practicum and Capstone experiences provide students with the opportunity to work on a supervised real-world project addressing a specific policy issue.  The Practicum/Capstone is the culmination of a student’s Masters program and is intended to integrate knowledge, methods, analysis, and teamwork.  For the 2011/2012 year, the faculty have identified a unique yearlong experience with the World Class Cities Partnership, a policy research program at Northeastern University.

The World Class Cities Partnership brings together civic, business and academic leaders from cities spanning the globe – Barcelona, Boston, Dublin, Guadalajara, Haifa, Hamburg, Lisbon, Lyon, and Vancouver – for the purpose of creating sustainable social change through policy research, and development and implementation of best practice solutions to common challenges.

In this two-semester experience, students will work in both a group setting and individually, assisting the WCCP in producing research-based deliverables that address the research focus of the Partnership.  This year’s policy research topic is Talent Retention and Job Creation — analyzing the attraction, retention, and loss of workforce participants.

This project provides an opportunity for students to work on a client project, gain real-world experience, engage in primary data collection, apply research methods to policy issues, and develop relationships with local and global WCCP participants.  All students will work on the Boston-based research and will then be assigned to one of our global partner cities to assist in survey research, interviews, and other primary data collection.  The primary deliverable is a series of case studies that highlight positive and negative implications of existing public policies.  The case studies will be supported by a literature scan incorporating theory and practice as well as collecting original data through talent flow surveys (created by WCCP and administered by each university partner), a review of existing policies, policy briefings and reports, and measurements designed for comparing policies across a global spectrum of cities.  To provide context for the research and an opportunity for experience, the students will also assist in creating, administering, and analyzing a survey regarding relations and expectations between universities and their host cities.