Snapshot
- Incoming Enrollment:
- 174 (83 MIA, 2 MIA-MPH, 5 MIP, 84 MPSA
- Avg GRE:
- 307 (optional for most)
- Avg GPA:
- 3.56
- Avg age:
- 24; 35 MIP
- Work Experience:
- desired but not required for most; MIP requires 4+ years int’l, professional experience
- % International:
- 11%
- % Students of Color:
- 20% MIA; 42% MPS
- Employment sectors:
- Federal government, government contractors, private, nonprofit/NGOs, state/local government, other
- Degrees Offered:
- College Station, TX: Master of International Affairs (MIA-48 hrs); combined MIA-Master of Public Health (MIA-MPH-78 hrs); Master of International Policy (MIP-30 hrs); Master of Public Service & Administration (MPSA-48 hrs)
- Washington, DC: Master of International Policy (MIP-DC-30 hrs); Master of National Security & Intelligence (MNSI-42 hrs) – begins Fall 2022
- Online: Executive MPSA (EMPSA-39 hrs); Graduate Certificates in International Affairs (CAIA-12 hrs), Homeland Security (CHLS-15 hrs), Nonprofit Management (CNPM-12 hrs), Public Management (PBMG-12 hrs)
- Tuition/Fees:
- MIA, MPSA: $13,400 resident costs per yr at 24 hrs; non-residents pay Texas rates due to non-resident waivers given with scholarship; MIP: $16,900 resident / $32,200 non-resident per
Prepare for Public Service. The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University is a nonpartisan graduate school home to on-campus master’s degrees in International Affairs (MIA), International Policy (MIP), International Affairs-Public Health (MIA-MPH), and Public Service & Administration (MPSA). Each provides extensive preparation for those desiring impactful careers. Students are taught from a mix of practitioners that include former diplomats, CIA agents, and federal administrators to academics that research cutting-edge topics and theories.
In the MIA and MIP, students focus on tracks of National Security & Diplomacy or International Development & Economic Policy. Concentrations include intelligence, international politics, conflict and development, diplomacy, defense, INGOs, regional studies, and more. The MIA integrates a professional summer internship or cultural study, a client capstone, and passage of a foreign language exam. The MIP focuses on executive-level/military students looking to enhance their professional skills, with no internship or foreign language requirement. The Bush School provides student development opportunities in leadership and writing, seminars and speakers, conferences, international study, collaborative learning, and student organizations.
The MIA enrolls 90 students per year with excellent employment rates (83-95% within 6 months of graduation). Admission is each fall and scholarships (and non-resident waivers) are awarded to all MIA students. The one-year MIP enrolls 2-10 students each fall and spring, but with no funding.
The Bush School’s online offerings include an Executive Master of Public Service degree as well as four graduate certificates in International Affairs, Homeland Security, Nonprofit Management, and Public Management. Students can earn an EMPSA of 39 hours or graduate certificates of 12-15 hours. Admission is year round and financial aid is available; veteran’s benefits are accepted in all programs. See our website for more information.
Residential interest:
On-campus:
[email protected]
979-862-3476
Online:
[email protected]
1-866-988-BUSH (2874)
Washington, DC:
[email protected]
202-773-0009
To receive information directly from the Admissions Department, click here.
How the Persian Gulf is Reshaping the World: Technology and Threats
Associate professor, Department of International Affairs
Region of instability
Nuclear technology and its geopolitical consequences have regained center stage in recent years. Increasing tensions among great powers and the spread of nuclear weapons to other states, combined with new technologies in weapons systems, cyberspace, and media, all threaten to undermine global and regional order.
Long dominated by oil and religious politics as well as armed conflicts, many Persian Gulf and broader Middle East states are now competing for advanced nuclear technology for strategic and domestic leverage. Iran has effectively established itself as a nuclear threshold state, and in response, Arab states have taken steps to develop civilian nuclear reactors. Some have even sought alternative nuclear suppliers in China and Russia, given U.S. refusal to provide an indigenous enrichment program, a critical element for states seeking the weapon option.
Arab states in the Persian Gulf have now established strong energy and economic ties with U.S. rivals. Multitrillion-dollar sovereign wealth funds are flowing across the globe, including to Chinese businesses and their high-tech sectors. This massive surge of wealth and investments has led some experts to state that the Persian Gulf is reshaping the world. The nexus of energy, nuclear ambitions, and chronic instability makes the region an evolving hotspot in international politics in the coming years.
Why the Bush School?
The Bush School is equipped to train the next generation of policymakers focused on proliferation and recent technological advances. Having both academic and practitioner backgrounds, our faculty have contributed to scholarship and debates on critical foreign policy issues. My own research on Iran’s foreign and nuclear policy has appeared in international relations journals as well as policy outlets such as Foreign Affairs.
Armed with theoretical foundations and methodological tools, students learn to conduct research, analyze contemporary issues, and be informed participants in policy debates. They delve into primary sources and examine declassified documents to understand how policy is made and implemented, and then further shaped by social media.
What practical experiences do you offer students?
Students complete a capstone project for a real-world client in their final semester. We offer a wide range of cutting-edge topics covering diplomacy, cyber, defense, intelligence, and more for government and nongovernmental entities in and outside of the United States. In the past decade, my capstone students have reported to the Department of State and the National Security Council on topics such as proxy warfare, Iran’s nuclear politics, U.S. strategic options toward Iran, the role of Russia and China in the Middle East, and hostage diplomacy.
This intense course pushes students to learn quickly about a topic they may know little about and produce a nuanced yet concise report for policymakers. They conduct interviews and background conversations with national security advisors, ambassadors, policy experts, academics, and journalists. Thanks to the ever-advancing communication and media technologies, our students engage with experts with diverse opinions and backgrounds, which, in turn, further elevate their critical thinking and communication skills.
A New Center of Excellence at the Bush School: The Strategic Importance of Economic Statecraft
Associate Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School
Founded by Dr. William Norris, The Bush School’s Economic Statecraft Program is a national center of excellence for the study of economics and security that serves as a magnetic pole for bringing together and stimulating a growing body of scholarship on the topic of economic statecraft.
What is Economic Statecraft?
Economic statecraft focuses on the intersection of economics and security. Commercial actors (not states) conduct the vast majority of international economic activity. These interactions may carry important implications for states’ strategic security interests. States can manipulate the incentives facing commercial actors in order to encourage (or discourage) particular patterns of behavior that generate security externalities that are conducive to the state’s strategic interests.
Such manipulation is defined as economic statecraft.
Examples of economic statecraft include the rise of Chinese foreign investment (e.g. China’s Belt & Road Initiative), the leveraging of SWIFT and sanctions against Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine, and the creation of the post-World War II Bretton Woods institutional architecture.
Why have a program on Economic Statecraft?
Although Chinese economic statecraft has become a prominent feature of the global strategic landscape and emerging US-China competition, there was no clear academic center of gravity in the U.S. for studying the important emerging phenomenon of how nations leverage economic tools of national power. Efforts to understand the crossroads between economics and security are scattered across institutions, scholars, and geography. Present-day conflicts increasingly involve economic statecraft, making it a central phenomenon of interest to policymakers and students alike. As an institution dedicated to educating the next generation of public servants, the Bush School seeks to connect methodologically rigorous scholarship with policy needs through the Economic Statecraft Program.
What does the Economic Statecraft Program do?
The program supports, sponsors and coordinates an active scholarly effort engaged in policy-relevant work designed to advance state of the art understanding of economic tools of national power. ESP hosts two working groups: the China Working Group, which focuses on research questions related to China’s economic statecraft, and the Eisenhower Working Group, which focuses on developing strategically sustainable responses to such developments. ESP works to establish partnerships and build stakeholder momentum across academia, policy, and business sectors. Key components of the program include our weekly “Tuesday Talks” speaker series and our annual symposium hosted at the Bush School’s DC Teaching Site. ESP also supports the production of reports and academic papers on various theoretical and empirical aspects of economic statecraft. ESP frequently collaborates with other researchers in related fields in an effort to foster an integrated community of top scholars doing work at the intersection of China, economics, and security.
How does economic statecraft fit into your work?
My first book was on the subject of China’s economic statecraft. The ESP has built on several of those insights and extended that research. I also work and teach on other aspects of China’s grand strategy more broadly, including China’s foreign policy and domestic politics as well as East Asian security. I enjoy working with our graduate students who aspire to careers in government working on these types of important issues.
A New Concentration Focused on Latin America: Preparing Students to Address the Region’s Most Pressing Challenges
Assistant Professor, PhD The Bush School of Government and Public Service Texas A&M University
The state of Texas is no stranger to border and immigration issues that have been in the forefront of national headlines for years. The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University recently expanded its regional focus to include Latin America, providing a rigorous and interactive option for those interested in studying the border, Mexico, and Latin America. Dr. Aileen Teague brings a global perspective to the coursework, both as a PhD in diplomatic history specializing in U.S.-Mexico relations and having travelled the world in a military family before serving in the Marine Corps.
What makes the Bush School’s Latin America concentration unique?
With the Brownsville-Matamoros border crossing located only 6.5 hours south of our College Station campus, the interdisciplinary Latin America concentration—drawing from history, politics, development, and border studies—provides students with a dynamic curriculum and practical tools to gain expertise in the region.
Our faculty help students gain a multi-perspectival understanding of regional issues both within nation-states and across country borders, where the social, political, and economic interconnectivity between the United States and its Latin American partners have reverberations on a global scale.
Students’ training in U.S.-Latin America relations integrates cutting-edge academic research with high impact learning experiences. For instance, as an historian of the drug trade in Mexico, I instill in my courses an appreciation for the ways in which historical legacies contextualize and complicate current policymaking.
American domestic politics and interactions also play a role when we bring in practitioners and policymakers to engage in dialogue with our students. A former assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security joined us in seminar recently to discuss the possibilities for comprehensive immigration reform and improved border security, given the highly partisan political environment.
Additionally, a capstone project features students interfacing with real-world governmental and non-governmental agencies operating in Latin America and internships that help students develop their professional networks. With the backing of one of the largest public universities in the country and alumni dedicated to giving back and supporting service, our students make their mark all over the world.
How does the Bush School promote new voices and new perspectives in U.S. relations with Mexico and Latin America?
While research is a bedrock of our Latin America concentration, we also highlight a range of perspectives from U.S. and foreign practitioners. In 2020, we launched “The Other Side of the Border: Ties that Bind and Issues that Divide,” a speaker series featuring human-centered and practitioner perspectives on issues related to the border, Mexico, and Central America.
We live in uncertain times when it comes to achieving reforms in immigration and border security in the post-Trump era. This project aims to facilitate dialogue between policy practitioners and our graduate students and is intended to unearth “off-the-book,” grassroots perspectives, which are often where the road begins to achieving reform. This year, for example, the series will feature a discussion with a Mexican journalist on the dangers of reporting on the drug war, as well as a conversation with an Amazonian activist on the challenges of utilizing international aid in the aftermath of the 2020 fires.
Training in Comparative and Rigorous Analysis for an Interconnected, Changing World
Associate Professor
The Bush School of Government and Public Service
Texas A&M University
The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University offers students rigorous training and opportunities to interface with policymakers preparing them to meet the challenges of careers in public service and international affairs today.
How is the Bush School preparing students to manage crises and global risk?
In addition to faculty who specialize in international institutions, the Bush School prepares students to engage in comparative analysis of countries and issues with faculty who specialize in almost every region from China to the Middle East, from Africa to Latin America. In this increasingly globalized world, most economic, social, and political phenomena do not stop at country borders. Understanding how issues arise and play out in one region can be instructive to understanding that in another region. In one example, my capstone classes have been collecting recent event data from across the globe on how leaders erode democratic institutions. Working closely with capstone clients in USAID, the State Department, and nongovernmental organizations, our analyses help us understand similar trends emerging across the globe and help inform U.S. investment in supporting civic space in closing contexts.
The capstone program is one of the highlights of the Bush School experience—giving students an opportunity to work closely with a policy organization to understand the types of questions they ask and to practice applying the research skills they’ve gained in class to thoroughly answer these questions. These experiences, along with the internships students complete between their first and second year, are instrumental in solidifying networks between the Bush School and the policy community with positive results: Bush School students find careers that matter to them, with between 81 and 95 percent employed within six months of graduation.
How does the Bush School prepare students to adapt to a rapidly changing policy context?
In these uncertain times, one of the best skills we can offer future public servants is adaptability. As policies constantly need to be reevaluated to match the changing context, our students will need the tools to assess where we are and how to change course. The Bush School offers a rigorous core curriculum on data collection and analysis as well as a menu of options for students seeking to deepen their methods skills. In addition, the Bush School is part of a large research university of over sixty thousand students that features world-class departments and institutes in a variety of fields, which offer further instruction in methods, like GIS or statistics, and in substantive areas that include public health, engineering, or agriculture.
Training we offer in the social science methods is key to informing broad, interdisciplinary policy issues, such as access and inequality. For instance, in the wake of COVID-19, the policy community, in addition to seeking advice from health experts, has also turned to colleagues in the social sciences to answer questions about the political and economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic and how existing inequalities can exacerbate its impact among some groups. With rapid-response surveys informed by theory, we can generate evidence to inform quick policy decisions—skills we are teaching Bush School students in our Methods sequence.
Meeting the Challenges of Emerging Sources of Power and Influence
Former CIA Chief of Counterintelligence, author of Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying and To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence
Professor of the Practice
The Bush School of Government and Public Service
Texas A&M University
For over twenty years the Bush School of Government and Public Service has prepared the next generation of public servants to deal with the complex challenges of a changing world. In a strictly nonpartisan environment, Bush School students discuss and debate the key international and domestic issues affecting our country and the world as a whole. A typical class could be led by a distinguished academic expert on the Middle East, a former administrator of the Agency for International Development, or an experienced practitioner in the field of international NGOs. The focus is clearly on the future: how can Bush School students make a difference in a world where power centers are changing, technology is rapidly altering how ideas are transmitted, and the once bipolar international arena has been replaced by a multiplicity of threats?
How is the Bush School different from other schools of international affairs and public service?
Probably the most distinctive feature of the Bush School is its professional focus. There is an expectation that the majority of Bush School graduates will go into careers in government, nonprofit management, or some other form of public service. As a result, the faculty is a blend of academic professionals and nationally recognized practitioners from the worlds of diplomacy, intelligence, the military, law enforcement, homeland security, nonprofit, development, and state and local government. In our experience, this has been a winning formula in preparing students for professional careers. Bush School graduates are comfortable in their academic fields but also have the hands-on skills and knowledge that employers value. Our intelligence and counterterrorism classes, for example, include practical training in professional tradecraft.
What are some of the other advantages of the Bush School experience?
All students accepted into the Bush School’s two-year programs receive a financial award and in-state tuition, reducing their debt load. Additionally, College Station offers an affordable cost of living, much lower than many competitor programs offer. These cost savings enable our students to choose jobs of interest to them, not what best repays their loans. Bush School students participate in culminating capstone projects where they deliver high-quality, faculty-guided research to real-world clients, such as the State Department, the Director of National Intelligence, U.S. military commands, and state and local governments. To develop their language skills, international affairs students are given no-cost access to foreign language software and discussion groups led by native speakers. In the summer between their first and second years, students either complete internships with government agencies or other sponsors or, alternatively, do intensive foreign language study. Finally, the Bush School is part of a large research university of over 60,000 students that features world-class departments and institutes in a variety of fields, including public health, cyber, nuclear engineering, transportation, agriculture, and many others. The Bush School’s close collaboration with these other units enables students to design tailored academic programs to address specialized career goals. With dedicated career staff and faculty helping along the way, Bush School students find careers that matter to them, with between 81 and 95 percent employed within six months of graduation.