ABSTRACT
The connection between universities and the public service in America has many components, but the labor market linkage may be the most important. As Frederick C. Mosher has pointed out, governments at national, state, and local levels are the largest employers of professionals, and universities provide the training for those professionals. Additionally, through their public administration and public policy programs, universities provide management and administrative training to in-service professionals and college graduates. Like recruiting top flight engineers and scientists for the government laboratories, attracting the best and brightest college graduates from other disciplines is an important part of maintaining the overall quality of the public service. The patterns of growth and change in the numbers and types of masters degrees granted over the past 25 years are similar to, but not the same as, the patterns in bachelors degrees granted.
