Many graduate public affairs programs offer both residential and online options for students. One of the challenges for multi-format programs is creating a sense of belonging among online students who may never set foot on campus. In 2017, the MPA program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill developed an “immersion” course designed for residential and online students in a weekend intensive format on campus to help create a greater sense of connectedness and satisfaction among (principally) online students, while benefiting students in both formats. This paper examines immersion courses as one strategy to address gaps in belonging and satisfaction between online and on-campus students. The case study of UNC-Chapel Hill developing the immersion course and the first three iterations of it are described, offering practical insight for other campus-based public affairs programs that also have online degrees who may want to try something similar.

Abstract This chapter argues that Latin American governments have expanded social investment policies but that one cannot really speak of a turn to social investment and away from the passive welfare state as the need to expand the net of social protection to the large sectors that previously were excluded has remained strong. To the extent that social investment has been adopted, it has been with the aim to create human capital and reduce vast inequality of opportunity. The emphasis has been on education and healthcare, linked to efforts at poverty reduction. The authors analyze the main protagonists of these reforms; the institutional structures that shaped them, particularly policy legacies and presidential partisan control over legislatures; and the power of antagonists of inclusive reforms. In addition to documenting general trends, they provide a number of brief comparative analyses of different reforms.

This article explores the consequences of public and private spending on education at all levels, looking at skills and income inequality. We use data for 22 affluent democracies from 1960 or 1995 (depending on data availability) to 2017. High levels of public education spending consistently lower income inequality, both measured as wage dispersion and as the education premium. In contrast, higher levels of private education spending are associated with both higher wage dispersion and a higher education premium. We show that this effect works in part through differential skills acquisition. Public education spending raises the math scores of 15-years old students at the mean and at the 25(th) percentile, but private education spending has no effect on skills at these levels. We find the same pattern among skills of adults; public education spending raises skills at the 25(th) percentile and the mean; private spending has no effect. Finally, we also show that higher levels of adult skills indeed depress the education premium.

How can educators leverage blogs and other social media spaces to encourage a reflective, critical discourse about civic engagement that fosters a true learning exchange over promoting one's own ideas? This article reports upon a single case study of the "Community Engagement Learning Exchange," a multi-author blog on civic engagement. Through qualitative content analysis and expert interviews with the blogger community we explored the interaction of digital citizenship and civic online discourse, in order to map out civic engagement pedagogies that make use of blogs or other shared writing / media tools. The content analysis of blog posts indicates that high verbosity scores for factual orientation, personalization and interactivity correlate with broader reach. The interview material was condensed into concept maps that identified specific themes for digital citizenship (inevitable, easy, transparent, technologically diverse and changing, unequal, divisive, difficult, superficial) and civic engagement pedagogies (content, format, authenticity, tone, listening, exemplary conduct, accountability, hope). Overall, in the community analyzed, ground rules and a shared writing style lead to discussions and learning processes that transcend differences in views, backgrounds and opinions. Further efforts to support and measure the right amount of friction that exemplifies diverse and even clashing opinions while keeping an online community together emerged from the case study as a future area of practice development for digital citizenship.