The College of New Rochelle was founded in 1904 by Ursuline nuns as a means to provide higher education and professional opportunities for women 16 years prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment of the United States, which granted women the right to vote. Building on its original commitment to women, the College reaches out to those who have not previously had access to higher education, and places particular emphasis on the concept of lifelong learning. With justice as its guiding principle, the College tries to respond to the needs of society through its educational programs, service activities and through fostering the concept of education-for-service. 

The Master of Public Administration (MPA) program at the College was inaugurated in the Fall of 2012 as a means to respond to the ever evolving needs of the communities that we serve. We primarily enroll in-service public and nonprofit sector employees who seek to enhance their administrative skills in order to obtain senior level positions within the public and nonprofit sectors. The majority of students who enroll in the MPA program are employed in health, human or social service agencies throughout New York City and lower Westchester County, with many of our students ultimately serving communities with a tremendous need for highly-trained, ethical and empathetic public service professionals. 

Our program has joined NASPAA because we seek to provide our students with the highest levels of public service training, of which NASPAA is uniquely positioned to assist us in achieving this goal. More specifically, as the accrediting body for public administration programs, NASPAA has a membership of approximately 300 graduate schools of  public policy, affairs, administration, and nonprofit management, which are located across the United States and in 14 countries. NASPAA also provides an annual conference, accreditation training, the Journal of Public Affairs Education and the opportunity for our students to join the Phi Alpha Alpha honor society. These are all services that will support our program as we grow and strive to meet the needs of the communities that we serve, by providing our students with the highest quality of public service education. 

Some of the goals of our program have been to build partnerships with other universities locally and abroad, so we have just developed and Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Medgar Evers College's undergraduate public administration program which guarantees their graduates admission into our program if they take certain courses while completing their bachelor's degree and maintaining a certain grade point average. In addition, we have also signed an MOU with the University of Padjadjaran which is located in Bandung, Indonesia. The purpose of this MOU is to facilitate more opportunities for joint research opportunities, the exchange of faculty and teaching materials and to develop mechanisms for our students to travel to Indonesia for faculty lead study abroad programs, and for their students to travel to New York for either short term study programs or to enroll in our MPA program. In addition, we are working with the University of Cape Town to develop our second faculty lead short-term study abroad program to Cape Town, South Africa in January 2017.  We have found that through partnership we are able to work with institutions locally and abroad to increase learning opportunities for students of public administration, and we are open to the development of more mutually beneficial partnerships.