Application Opens: September 1, 2024
Application Deadline: January 15, 2025

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Important Dates

Application deadline for all students, including Brown seniors:

January 15, 2025, 11:59 p.m. EDT

The application portal will reopen in early September 2024 for the next admissions cycle.

Application Fee

The application fee is $100. Application fee waiver information can be found within the admissions application portal. 

Quantitative Resume

The MPA curriculum includes coursework in economics and statistics, and incoming students must demonstrate potential to complete these courses successfully. To demonstrate your quantitative potential, you must submit GRE General Test Scores or a quantitative resume. We strongly encourage all applicants to submit GRE General Test Scores. Applicants that submit GRE scores may also wish to submit a quantitative resume. 

In your quantitative resume, please summarize any relevant professional and/or academic experience in quantitative analysis. Experiences may include full-time work, paid or unpaid internships, volunteering, extra-curricular activities, personal projects, or academic coursework that required significant quantitative skills (e.g. calculus, economics, statistics) or programming skills (e.g., Python, R, Stata, SQL). 

Your quantitative resume should differ from your professional resume and should not include non-quantitative experiences. We strongly advise applicants whose academic experiences include only introductory mathematical reasoning classes or similar for distribution requirements, and who do not have significant experience doing quantitative analytical work from other sources, to take the GRE general exam.

Sample quantitative resume

Personal Statement

Our program’s mission is to cultivate and elevate the next generation of global leaders to address pressing societal challenges. We look forward to learning about why you have decided to pursue graduate work in public affairs through Brown’s MPA. As you think about your future career path, how might you envision yourself addressing the societal challenges you care most about? How would the curriculum and opportunities offered in our MPA program help you advance toward your vision?

You will have the opportunity to upload a copy of your personal statement document directly to the application portal. There is no minimum word limit, but we encourage you to stay below 1500 words.

Mathematical Fluency

To ensure your success in the MPA program, and the quantitative core in particular, we strongly encourage students to consider their mathematical fluency and take additional preparatory steps if their undergraduate coursework did not include algebra or pre-calculus.

General fluency with the algebraic representation of math will be helpful in letting students focus on new material for the first summer courses. Incoming MPA students should be prepared for a rigorous program with a focus on these three areas:

• Algebraic manipulation, e.g. knowing that [X/Y + X/(X+Y)] = (X^2 + 2XY)/(Y^2 + XY)
• Graphing and Data (e.g. histograms, scatterplots)
• Calculus, with a focus on knowing how to take derivatives of a few simple forms

There are many online courses or less-formal YouTube videos (e.g. Khan academy) that go through each of these concepts. The program also has a math prep module in May to help assess student’s math abilities and bring them up to speed. It should be noted, however, that the May module will not focus on algebraic or calculus skills.

Finally, it is very useful for students to have an understanding of how to use Excel. The program also has an Excel prep course during orientation week, but it’s more of a refresher, so getting comfortable in this program in advance is useful.

Merit-Based Scholarships

The Brown Master of Public Affairs Program considers admitted students for a variety of scholarship opportunities, and all admitted MPA students receive some level of merit-based financial aid. There is no additional application process to be considered for our MPA merit based scholarships, as our scholarships committee will utilize all information provided in the admissions application to make scholarship decisions through holistic review. Learn more about MPA Scholarships and Merit Aid.

Student loans are also available through our Office of Financial Aid to eligible applicants who submit the FAFSA by April 15. 

Transcript Verification for International Applicants

In order to apply, all applicants must provide, at a minimum, unofficial transcripts of all past or current post-secondary institutions attended. 

Brown requires verified transcripts if:

• You have attended or are completing a degree at a post-secondary institution outside of the United States AND
• You are admitted to the MPA program AND
• You accept your offer of admission.

For credential evaluations, we accept ECE, WES and SpanTran (who are now The Evaluation Company). For applicants with undergraduate degrees from India, we encourage the submission of WES or ECE over The Evaluation Company (TEC).  Please request the course-by-course report.

Admissions Questions

See our frequently asked questions page.

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