MPA-ESP students present to the Association of Energy Engineers on campus sustainable development

A report by six students in the Master of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy (MPA-ESP) program will be presented to the Association of Energy Engineers on April 18, 2006. Nicole Cosmann, Matt Gray, Thomas Legge, JP Leous, Neal Parry, and Lyndon Valicenti, of the class of 2006, interviewed members of the administration, faculty, and facilities management about campus sustainable development. The students prepared the report entitled “Perceptions of Campus Environmental Sustainability at Columbia University” for the course, Quantitative Techniques and Systems Analysis in Policymaking and Management, taught by Bogdan Vasi, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). 

The primary goal of Professor Vasi’s course is to familiarize students with research methods and quantitative techniques so they have the ability to design environmental policy research and interpret results. At the end of the course’s first semester, students work in groups on a project and apply the skills they have learned to an environmental problem of their choosing. When Professor Vasi began teaching the two-semester course in Fall 2006, he changed the curriculum from one that focused almost wholly on statistics to a course that provided a broader overview of both quantitative and qualitative techniques during the first semester.  

This wider skill-set allowed the six MPA-ESP students to conduct a more comprehensive report on perceptions of campus sustainability. Professor Vasi commented, “The Campus Sustainability project is unique in the sense that it is not quantitative research, it is not just a survey. It is an open-ended report using qualitative methods and interviews." 

Professor Vasi thinks the semester projects provide an opportunity for students to familiarize themselves with the logistics of social science research. In the case of the campus sustainability report, said Professor Vasi, “It was an interesting learning experience for the students to work on a topic that they considered important and that can positively influence the perceptions and behaviors within the University regarding environmental sustainability.”

Other groups, which mostly used quantitative methods to design and apply their own surveys, addressed topics that ranged from local matters, such as an assessment of student opinion on recycling at Columbia University, to far-reaching environmental issues including “Transportation Choices in the United States,” “Consumer Attitudes Toward Renewable Energy,” and “Media Policy and Public Opinion on Environmental Degradation and Natural Disasters.”

“I think that a lot of environmental problems have technological solutions already available, but how to create social change so as to adopt new technologies and diffuse them? This is a question that can be answered using social science research, so students must know how to conduct this research, make sense of the results, and make policy recommendations based on these results,” said Professor Vasi. Skills learned in the Quantitative Techniques course will be important for graduates who go on to careers as public managers and policymakers. Said Professor Vasi, “I think the [MPA-ESP] program is pretty unique in the sense it combines natural and social sciences. The quantitative techniques course is crucial for the social science dimension of this.”

Campus Sustainability Report