Analysis And Research On MPA’s Thesis Topics In China

As an professional degree education, Master of Public Administration (MPA) faces the practice of public administration directly, and aims to cultivate the compound, application and specialized high-level public management talents. Since the MPA program landed in China in2001, Chinese educators gradually explore and construct the public administration talents cultivation and education mode with Chinese characteristics, which are different from the academic talents cultivation and education mode. As a last key link of MPA education, MPA thesis can test the MPA students’knowledge structure, competency structure and competency standard, and is a concrete manifestation of the theory to guide practice. Thesis topics directly determine the thesis’application value. However, because of the impact of academic graduates’ cultivation inertia, Chinese MPA’s thesis topics doesn’t form a unified and standardized guidance mode. It is not conductive to cultivate public administration application talents.This paper used literature analysis, systematic sampling, content analysis, statistical analysis and interview to analyze the topic of1708MPA theses in10Chinese universities from2004to2010. The direction of topic, key word and level of hot topic, and type of thesis were analyzed, and the characteristics of MPA thesis topic with the time was explored. There are a lot of problem in MPA thesis topic, such as the distribution unbalance, research duplication, type of thesis disproportion, thesis topic over broad, and so on. On these basis, this paper explore the reasons from the cultivation plan, social policy, instructor’s background and student source. Finally, according to the status quo of Chinese MPA thesis topic, this paper suggest some measures in order to improve the level of the MPA thesis topic from the student, cultivation unit and instructor three perspectives.