Introduction

The development of public administration as a disciplinary field in Argentina sees higher education as one of its realms or core processes of analysis (besides professionalization, empowerment, and academic concentration). It could be about its universal or national history, the biography of a relevant actor, a field of studies, or some particular issues (Cardozo and Bulcourf, 2011). This education has increased at pre-undergraduate, undergraduate, and especially postgraduate levels. It has been pivotal in the developmental process of public administration as a field in our country, following in the footsteps of the US and Europe. At the postgraduate level, the milestones have been the creation of the master's degree program in public policies at the University Torcuato Di Tella in 1985 or the master's in public administration at the Faculty of Economic Sciences – University of Buenos Aires. Today, there are 84 postgraduate programs, such as diplomas, specialists, masters, and doctorates, throughout Argentina, both in state and non-state universities.

This chapter aims to characterize and analyze the distribution and structure of postgraduate university education in Argentina from the 1990s to the present. Within the context of the state reform and the administration reform, university programs in administration, management, and public policies have proliferated, thus leading to a growing interest in studying and researching the institutional and curricular aspects of these academic provisions at the college, undergraduate, and graduate levels. Overall, we could identify the progress to institutionalizing public administration as an academic field in our country during 1990–2022. This field has grown at all educational levels, mainly at the postgraduate. This scenario triggered a set of questions: What institutional and curricular features does the postgraduate university education have? How has it evolved in recent decades? What is the level of dialogue between the postgraduate university provisions and the public sector requirements? What kind of graduates does the academic offer produce?

With this set guiding our work, we first describe the academic programs. We consider the postgraduate programs’ distribution in the public and private sectors and the region of the country. Second, we analyze the provisions by levels, that is, specialists, master’s, and doctorate according to the formats and contents of their curricula.