Government to the Nth Degree

In School Without a Campus, Nuts and Bolts of Bureaucracy

It is a graduate school with 100,000 students but no tenured faculty, no campus to speak of and no degree-granting powers. And despite its name -- "Graduate School, USDA" -- it has very little to do with the U.S. Department of Agriculture or farming.

Instead, the unusual 85-year-old institution is one of the most popular adult education and federal training centers in the country, offering more than 1,000 classes in more than 70 cities for government workers and ordinary folks alike. It does it all without any money from Congress, paying for its operations through tuition charges and training contracts.

"We're a self-financing organization," Jerry T. Ice, the school's executive director, said in an interview. "The folks that work at the graduate school are not federal employees."

Plenty of the people the school serves work for the federal bureaucracy, though.

Every weekday, agencies all over Washington send hundreds of employees to a private office building near the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station, where the Graduate School offers federal training in subjects such as financial management, government auditing, human resources and information technology. The school is the place for unsexy but useful classes such as "Federal Budgeting for Non-Budgeting Personnel," "Position Classification for Supervisors and Administrative Staff," and "The Role of the Human Resources Specialist in Competitive Sourcing."

The school has a staff of 300, an annual budget of more than $60 million and a governing board whose 17 members are appointed by the secretary of agriculture. There is no faculty in the traditional sense. All of the school's instructors are contractors, many of them government professionals giving lessons from the trenches.

The other day, E. Steven Potts, 58, a former budget planner at the Pentagon and the Energy Department, led a "Budget Formulation" class for 25 federal employees, all of whom were seated at clusters of metal and fake-wood desks reminiscent of high school. The class, which meets for seven hours each day, is all about how to put together an agency budget, a process the school's catalogue describes as "not a science, but a refined art."

"What we plan, we can achieve," Potts told his students at one point. "The difficulty is most of us haven't been doing this. Most of us have just been asking for more money -- like we did the year before."

In an interview later, Potts compared budget assembly to fiction writing. "It's like being Tom Clancy," he said. "He writes for millions [of dollars], we write for billions. It's our job in this class to help them understand how to plan a budget so that it makes sense both inside the administration as well as to Congress."

Diana J. Kurey, 53, a budget technician for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, enrolled in the four-day class last month, with her agency picking up the $845 tab.

"It's so specialized, most of what we do in our work, that this is really the only place that I've found that offers something practical and that you can apply to your job," Kurey said. "It's about federal procedures and how things are done."

Classmate Kelly Barnes, 33, a certified public accountant and branch chief for federal reporting at the Smithsonian Institution, said she mainly wanted to add the school's government certification in financial management to her résumé.

"For me, it just looks good," Barnes said. "I just like to put a lot of things on my résumé. . . . I don't think it's going to help me in my agency. It's just a personal goal."

The school got its start because of a human resources problem. Early in the last century, the Agriculture Department saw high turnover among its research scientists, who craved continuing education and training but had no place to get it in the government.

In 1921, Agriculture Secretary Henry C. Wallace created the Graduate School to provide that training and stanch the exodus. It had 176 students on its first day, taking science, economics and statistics classes in the department's headquarters.

Over the decades, the school evolved into a vast daytime federal training operation, now its bread and butter financially. It added language and personal-enrichment classes at night and on weekends, drawing many students from outside government for fare such as the Arabic language, "How to Publish Freelance Articles," "Spring Flower Identification," and "Photographing Wildlife and Nature."

The curriculum expanded in 1995 when the Office of Personnel Management got out of the training business and transferred eight of its regional training centers to the Graduate School. The school now has regional offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Honolulu, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

"Eighty-five years of the graduate school -- that's a long time for an organization," Ice said. "And it continues to grow and be different."