This article is part of our general graduate school advice, complementing our in-depth, degree-specific guides on policy master’s programs and law school.
The three most common types of graduate degrees among policy professionals are (1) policy master’s degrees, (2) law degrees, and (3) PhDs, most often in the social sciences.
Among these options, a policy master’s degree often provides the best balance of benefits over costs for those wishing to advance their policy careers. Policy master’s are generally shorter, cheaper, and better optimized to prepare students for future policy work compared to the alternatives.
This article considers the main upsides and downsides of different graduate degree options, and explains when it can make sense to do a specific option.
Degree comparison
The table below compares policy master’s, law school, and PhD across several important dimensions. This comparison is highly simplified since there is great variation in each of these degree categories, as much depends on the specifics of the individual program and school. The focus is generally on the top programs in each of the degree categories.
| Comparing the main graduate degree options for policy careers (simplified) | ||||
| Policy master’s | Law degree | Policy-related PhD | ||
| Opportunity cost | Duration | 2 years | 3 years | 5-6 years |
| Workload | Low to medium | Medium to high | Medium to high | |
| Job compatibility | Medium to high | Low to medium | Medium to high | |
| Monetary cost1 | Medium (~$100k) | High (~$200k) | Low (usually paid) | |
| Location | Some top schools in DC2 | Top schools all outside DC3 | Most top schools outside DC | |
| Acceptance difficulty | Low-medium (~15-50%) | High | High | |
| Credentialing value | Medium | High | Very high | |
| Learning value | Low to medium | Low to medium | Medium to high | |
While policy master’s are the default for policy work, many people reasonably prefer law school or a PhD given their specific circumstances.
When to do law school for policy work
If you want to work in policy long-term, attending law school might be your best option if you
- want to work as a government lawyer (e.g. on litigation) or shape policy through legal advocacy outside of government (or at least want to keep this option open),
- can get into a top law school,
- enjoy learning about law and the legal system, and
- want a high-earning, well-regarded non-policy backup option.
When to do a PhD for policy work
We generally advise against pursuing a traditional PhD for policy work. Our PhD guide explains why in detail, but the main concerns are (1) high opportunity cost (5–7 years that could be spent completing a shorter degree and gaining direct policy experience) and (2) incentive misalignment with policy career goals (PhDs primarily prepare you for an academic career).
That said, the guide also covers circumstances when a PhD could still make sense, including if you:
- are targeting senior roles at institutions that prize PhDs (e.g. science-focused agencies like NSF, NIH, or OSTP; economist positions; certain “old-school” think tanks),
- want to keep open the option of an academic career, or
- can pursue specific low-opportunity-cost or policy-oriented programs (e.g. RAND’s PhD in Policy Analysis, shorter UK PhDs, or part-time options).
If you do pursue a PhD with policy work as your goal, you’ll need to actively resist standard academic incentives—building relationships with policy practitioners rather than only academics, pursuing part-time policy affiliations, and potentially relocating to DC after your coursework phase. See the guide’s section on optimizing your PhD for policy impact for detailed strategies.
If you want to get a US PhD, we strongly recommend not first getting a master’s degree due to the time costs (unlike in Europe; see footnote).4
Other degree types
STEM degrees
There are plenty of successful policy professionals with STEM degrees, though STEM graduates are still very underrepresented compared to the social sciences and humanities. Selection effects likely explain a significant part of this difference since fewer STEM graduates try to go into policy. When STEM graduates do enter policy, they are more likely to work in science and technology (S&T) policy—for instance, computer science or biology majors respectively working on AI policy or biosecurity policy.5 Many people at S&T-related agencies hold STEM degrees, such as at the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. Some S&T policy jobs may prefer or even require applicants to hold a STEM degree.
STEM graduate degrees may provide valuable technical knowledge and boost your credibility for S&T policy work. In light of these benefits, we encourage those who already hold a STEM graduate degree (or are in the process of completing one) to consider policy work as a promising alternative to technical work. Fortunately, many fellowships support STEM graduates pivoting into policy work, including the Horizon Fellowship6, the AAAS Fellowship, TechCongress, and the Mirzayan Fellowship.
Nevertheless, we do not generally recommend pursuing a (pure) STEM graduate degree for the purpose of working in policy long-term. This is because pure STEM degrees are not designed to prepare students for a policy career. They typically provide less policy-relevant career capital, such as policy knowledge, skills, networking opportunities, and the flexibility to work in policy alongside the degree. In contrast, policy master’s degrees—and, to a lesser extent, law degrees—are optimized to provide these benefits. One promising class of graduate degrees that may get the best of both worlds are those that combine technical and policy classes (a few select examples in the footnote7).
There are also usually less costly ways to gain the benefits of a STEM graduate degree. In particular, the knowledge you build in a STEM degree is usually much more detailed than what you need for policy work, even in S&T policy. Thus, the vast majority of the technical facts you learn in a STEM degree will not be directly relevant to policy work. Clearly, it is very beneficial to have at least a baseline technical understanding for regulating, say, AI or biotechnology. But most aspiring policy professionals can learn enough technical knowledge through elective classes in a policy degree, online courses, self-study, books, newsletters, and from interaction with technical experts.
Despite our general recommendation, a STEM degree may be the right choice in specific circumstances, such as (1) if you haven’t decided yet between doing technical or policy work long-term and want to keep open the option of technical work8; (2) if you want to bridge the technical and policy communities and feel you need the technical training and credential to be taken seriously by technical experts; or (3) if you aim for senior positions in specific technology policy institutions that usually recruit people with strong technical credentials.
If you’re interested in AI policy in particular, you might also consider completing a technical online master’s, especially if you can do so part-time while working in DC policy. For example, Georgia Tech and UT Austin respectively offer online master’s of science in AI and computer science (with a machine learning specialization) that stand out for being remote-friendly, relatively cheap (i.e. ~$7,000-$10,000 total), flexible (i.e. asynchronous, part-time options), and short (i.e. can be completed in 1-1.5 years). These degrees provide a strong technical education and credential, while being compatible with full-time or part-time employment—which greatly reduces their opportunity cost. Both degrees have technical prerequisites, which you can complete either via a relevant undergraduate degree or via taking 1-2 semesters worth of specific technical (online) courses as preparation.9
Master of Business Administration (MBA)
We don’t generally recommend completing an MBA for the purpose of working in policy long-term. MBAs are business degrees preparing students for private sector work, particularly as managers (MPAs are the public sector equivalent to an MBA). MBA curricula typically include little public policy content and must meet the needs of people seeking to work in everything from manufacturing to banking/finance to intellectual property. Only a very small minority of business school students intends to work in policy after graduation.
Still, there are some policy professionals with MBAs, often those who pivoted their career after successful entrepreneurship or business work. So, if you have an MBA (or are about to get one), there are many opportunities for you to switch to policy work later if you’d like.
Master of Public Health (MPH)
Master’s of public health (MPH) are often more STEM-oriented and technical than pure policy master’s like MPAs. MPH degrees often combine (i) medical and technical classes preparing you to be a public health worker and (ii) policy classes setting you up for future policy work—the emphasis on (i) versus (ii) varies a lot by program. Anecdotally, path (i) seems more common, and a lot of MPH professors, current students, and alumni are (aspiring) public health workers at the state, national, and local levels. So, completing an MPH carries a risk of pigeon-holing, especially if you don’t cultivate a network in policy, but it does give you more of a claim to technical expertise.
Compared to typical policy degrees, an MPH is a more specialized credential that will be high-value in a smaller set of places (e.g. the CDC, USAID, CHS) but less valuable in most policy settings.
We don’t generally recommend MPHs as highly as other policy degrees, but they might be a good option for some people interested in biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. See this footnote for some top MPH options.10 But if your professional goal is to prevent future pandemics, there are some more specialized DC-based biosecurity policy programs that we recommend more highly than MPHs (see footnote).11
Footnotes
- This only considers the direct monetary cost paid for e.g. tuition, but not the foregone earnings from (partially) leaving the workforce. The lost earnings cost depends mostly on the duration and job compatibility of the degree. ↩︎
- ↩︎
- DC has several laws schools that are good but not in the top 14, such as Georgetown (#15), George Mason (#32), and George Washington (#35). ↩︎
- This is different in the American versus European educational systems. In Europe and the UK, master’s degrees and PhDs are complements that you do sequentially (i.e. you first do a 1-2 year master’s degree and then do a 3-4 year PhD). In the US, in contrast, master’s and PhDs are usually substitutes, such that you do one or the other but not usually both (US PhD’s often take 5-6 years since they include an initial 1-2 year course phase equivalent to a master’s program, which you almost certainly can’t skip even if you previously got a master’s elsewhere). ↩︎
- What counts as “technical expertise” in DC can be very broad. If you have completed any STEM degree, you may often find yourself the most technical person in the room in DC policy circles. And you may be asked to weigh in on technical topics well outside your area of expertise. ↩︎
- Note that this website is a project of the Horizon Institute for Public Service, which also runs the Horizon Fellowship. ↩︎
- For example, Georgetown’s MS in Biohazardous Threat Agents & Emerging Infectious Diseases, MIT’s Master’s in Technology and Policy, or Cambridge’s MPhil in Technology Policy. ↩︎
- It is generally much easier to switch from technical to policy work than vice versa. ↩︎
- Georgia Tech clearly lays out the prerequisites and links to several relatively cheap online courses in computer science and math that would fulfill the master’s admission requirements (though completing these courses doesn’t guarantee admission to the master’s program). Similarly, UT Austin provides an admissions guide for their AI master’s program, which lists the prerequisites and notes that “Applicants who have a degree that is not in artificial intelligence or a related field should provide evidence of relevant content knowledge through coursework or work experience.” ↩︎
- 1. Harvard University: more focused on health policy.
2. Johns Hopkins University: more clinical and quantitative, and has the Center for Health Security.
3. Yale University: offers an MPH in Health Policy and MPH in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases.
4. George Washington University: all the benefits of being based in DC, offers various MPH concentrations relevant to bio policy (namely Global Health Epidemiology and Disease Control; Global Health Policy; and Health Policy).
5. Columbia University
6. Emory University
(International pick: the London School of Hygiene and Medicine) ↩︎ - Here are several great biosecurity and health security-oriented master’s that combine policy with technical classes:
Georgetown University, MS Biohazardous Threat Agents & Emerging Infectious Diseases
Georgetown University, MS in Global Infectious Disease
George Mason University, Master’s in Biodefense (also available as PhD) ↩︎
