Public Policy Evaluation & Analysis Project

Full course description

You will deliver a group policy evaluation report and a blog post on a pertinent policy topic. This year’s topic is the Government of Netherlands’ intent to limit the number of English-language courses at Dutch universities, “Steps to improve the management of incoming international students.” You are expected to frame the problem driving the policy and reconstruct it using a realist evaluation approach to understand and clarify how it intends to achieve its objectives. You would further propose policy options that could achieve a similar goal and develop evaluation criteria using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to evaluate (the original policy and two proposed alternatives) and propose a preferred option systematically. The report would consist of a maximum of 3000 words (10%+ rule!) in 1.5 line spacing (excluding references and annexes). The communicative output (blog post) must be a maximum of 1000. This output will be targeted at the university’s website, which will host the best group outputs.

In the project, students will systematically evaluate a real-life public policy. In doing so, they will work in small teams (probably 3 teams of 4 students per tutorial group). In the first week of the project, students will jointly design a research work plan and make agreements on how they will work together as a team. Supporting workshops will be organized on the analytical approaches to be adopted for the project. This will include the realist evaluation approach, multi-criteria decision analysis and how to write a blog. The second and third weeks are dedicated to the actual research on the policy and its evaluation. Students also start working on their written reports and blogs during this time. Teamwork is critical in this stage to share and assign tasks. The report and the blog post will be finalized in the fourth week.