Public Policy Evaluation & Analysis Project

Full course description

In a 3 week engagement, you will deliver a group policy evaluation report and a blog post on a pertinent policy topic. The 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 two policy options that could achieve a similar goal. To analyse the policy options, your team will develop evaluation criteria using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to evaluate (the original policy and two proposed alternatives) and propose a preferred option as the best course of action. The report would have 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 for publication.

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 organised on the analytical approaches that will be used for the project. This will include the realist evaluation approach, multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and how to write a blog. The second week will be dedicated to researching the policy and evaluating it. 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 final report and the blog post will be finalised and submitted in the third week.