We reviewed 200 public policy masters degrees. Only one teaches AI governance.
Our research shows that most future public servants will graduate without the skills to oversee the technologies already reshaping government.
Over the past few months, major digital government failures have again been in the headlines. In the United Kingdom, the release of the first report of the public inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal, in which thousands of sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of fraud because of a faulty IT system, has renewed media attention. In Australia, a record compensation settlement was agreed for the Robodebt affair, where an automated welfare debt recovery scheme unlawfully targeted hundreds of thousands of citizens. And in the United States, the use of AI to analyse financial data by inexperienced DOGE contractors has reportedly caused billions of dollars in accounting errors.
While these are major cases affecting hundreds of thousands of people, they are in no way isolated. In recent years, the German Constitutional Court has found that Hamburg unlawfully used algorithms for predictive policing, a court in Argentina found that Buenos Aires illegally used automated facial recognition tools, in India a state government algorithm was found to predict that people had died even though they were still alive and in Sweden a regional government spent hundreds of millions of euros on a digital healthcare system which had to be scrapped the day after launch. Despite efforts to improve digital government over the past decade, significant problems with the way that governments use technology remain.
And AI is making these problems worse. While AI has the potential to improve government service delivery, data analysis and efficiency, the prevailing AI hype culture is leading to introduction of AI in government in a way that is too fast, too uncritical and without enough consideration of potential risks and harms. Combine this with unchecked algorithms feeding political polarisation and a geopolitical landscape dominated by big tech, and our societies are facing serious risks.
Yet, what we are seeing is that the next generation of public leaders - who need to lead this work - often graduate without the knowledge or skills to do so. Many future public and political leaders study political science, public administration and public policy, but these higher education public affairs programmes fail to deliver the digital-era skills that today’s governments need. As policy decisions are increasingly shaped by AI, algorithms, data and the digital economy, public leaders need to be trained in how to use and govern digital technologies and AI effectively and in the public interest.
To better understand the state of digital government education, we recently reviewed the top 100 masters-level public affairs university programmes in the US and the top 100 programmes in Europe to see which courses they offer. The results are concerning. Out of these 200 programmes, only one - at the University of Linköping in Sweden - offers a core course that explicitly covers issues of AI governance and ethics. And it gets worse: less than 30% of these programmes offer any type of core course on technlogy at all. Yet, all the graduates of these programmes are going to have careers where their work is mediated by technology on a daily basis, and many of them will end up responsible for AI governance. Here is what we found:
Only one programme offers a core course that covers AI/digital governance or ethics.
In the US, 13 programmes offer an elective course that covers AI/digital governance or ethics.
In Europe, 14 programmes offer an elective course that covers AI/digital governance or ethics.
In the US, 12 programmes offer a core course on IT or digital technologies.
In Europe, 17 programmes offer a coure course on IT or digital technologies.
In the US, 40 programmes offer an elective course on IT or digital technologies.
In Europe, 30 programmes offer an elective course on IT or digital technologies.
This is obviously a major problem. The majority of these university programmes are completely failing to prepare their students for a career in a modern, digital-era public sector. What this means is that our future political and public leaders, who will be responsible for shaping how governments and societies adapt to new technologies can graduate without ever discussing how these technologies work or the risks that they carry. It’s hard to imagine another field where such a disconnect would be acceptable. We are producing a generation of public policy experts who lack the fundamental knowledge to deal with one of the world’s most important policy issues.
There is some light at the end of the tunnel. Our review also found that 31 public affairs programmes in Europe and 40 programmes in the US offer optional electives on digital technologies. While the courses are very varied - ranging from technical IT security, public information systems and data science courses to policy-focused courses covering public interest technology, AI governance and e-government - this is important, and a sign that public affairs schools are beginning to recognise the urgency of these topics.
I’m proud that Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age is contributing to this change. Our open-access digital government syllabus is now being used by more than 80 universities in 35 countries and has been used to inspire important courses such as Digital Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, Digital Governance and Technology Management at the University of Georgia, Governing in the Digital Era at Georgetown University and Public Service in a Digital Age at the Berlin Hertie School. Over the last few years we have built a network of 400 professors and educators of public policy who believe that digital-era government is an important topic and want to teach their students how technology shapes policy. The challenge now is to move from optional electives to core courses, making teaching digital and AI competencies a key part of the public affairs educational system.
Integrating AI and digital skills into public affairs education is not about turning policy students into programmers or data scientists. What we need to do is equip them with the understanding needed to ask the right questions, including about the risks and harms that can be caused by data, accountability in automated decisions and how to use digital technologies to improve public outcomes. Frameworks like our digital-era government competencies for public leaders and the UNESCO AI and digital transformation competencies for civil servants can be used to create courses that equip current and future public officials with this crucial knowledge.
This isn’t an unsolvable problem. Many schools of public affairs are already well positioned to teach about technology in government, they just need to elevate its importance and make it part of their core teaching. This means both making AI and digital literacy core subjects rather than niche electives and introducing learning on digital-era government in core courses on public policy, law and statistics.