The University of San Diego’s
Institute for Nonprofit Education and Research
The University of San Diego’s Institute for Nonprofit Education and Research that is housed within the School of Leadership and Education Sciences (SOLES) is getting ready to graduate its tenth cohort in June of 2011.
The program was the brainchild of Pat Libby. A Boston native, she worked as a CEO, board member, and consultant to numerous nonprofits since 1978. She also taught nonprofit management for eight years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (her alma mater) before being recruited by USD to create a master’s program in Nonprofit Management and Leadership.
Ten years later, Pat and her very dedicated team have created one of the most highly recognized and most respected master’s programs in the country. Her vision came to be known as pracademics (daily practical and applied learning in an academic setting for those middle and upper management people working in nonprofit. The master’s degree is an extremely rigorous program with thirteen applied projects in lieu of a dissertation. Most of the professors are adjunct notables working in their respective fields of nonprofit. The program is tailored to fit the busy schedules of people already employed full time.
We work tirelessly, along with a very cooperative USD, to ensure that the cost of the degree is affordable to those individuals who are dedicating their lives in service to others.
From this extremely successful master’s program came our doc program. This specialization is intended for students with interest and experience in the nonprofit sector. Our doctoral students are required to do their dissertation research in an area pertaining to Nonprofit/Philanthropic studies.
I was privileged to meet Pat Libby very early in her program and we began our ten-year collaboration into helping grow the nonprofit sector through the higher education of the managers and leaders of nonprofits.
My vision was always to help the entire philanthropic and nonprofit sectors primarily in San Diego by providing research, evaluation and consulting services that build the leadership and strategic and evaluative thinking capacity of local nonprofits as well as to be the leading source of information, data and research on the local nonprofit sector. That outgrowth was the Caster Family Center of Education and Research.
The Institute for Nonprofit Education and Research is now considered to be one of the top three in the country. We are also the only learning institute in this arena without an endowment to ensure the continued success of our amazing program.
