How well is the public policy major at chicago seen? is it a popular option? where do most people who major in this discipline end up working?
Yeah pub pol is pretty huge here, several of my friends have it as a major. Double majoring in econ is pretty popular too. It’s not a particularly difficult major. Many of the professors are quire distinguished. John Mearsheimer’s one of the crazier ones, but that’s what makes his classes so fun.
Career outcomes are all over the map. Finance/Government/Think Tanks are the big ones. A lot go into some sort of consulting.
General feeling is that pub pol is econ with less math. Lots of people major in it because it’s kind of like an easier version of econ (if you’re not a fan of math).
Public Policy is strong at Chicago but the Harris School is not in the same league as the Harvard Kennedy School (albeit HKS does not accept undergraduates). Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School is also more highly regarded as, arguably, is Columbia’s SIPA. Chicago’s peers are Michigan, Berkeley.
John Mearsheimer is a famous professor in the Political Science department. He does not teach Public Policy courses; he does not teach in the Harris School.
As others have noted, at Chicago (and elsewhere) “Public Policy” generally means “economics, but you don’t have to take as much math or spend a lot of time on finance,” although a more sympathetic description might be “using methods from various social science disciplines to analyze issues that might be addressed by governments.” Either way, that makes it pretty popular, and the skills are useful in the private sector, too.