Note: Because we’re sending this Special Edition today, our regular Weekly Briefing will go out this weekend.
On Wednesday, Dean Jeremy Weinstein (PhD ‘03) released HKS 2036, Harvard Kennedy School’s (HKS) 10-year vision for the school.
HKS 2036 is the culmination of nearly two years of institutional listening and a multi-stakeholder strategic review process. Since arriving at HKS nearly two years ago, Weinstein has made a concerted effort to understand the school from the inside out. Just 10 months into his tenure, a Crimson profile described how Weinstein met individually with each of HKS’s nearly 200 faculty and had received “only resounding praise” from a “rarely satisfied faculty.” He built on that foundation to spearhead HKS 2036 through a year-long review process that included five faculty and staff task forces and extensive community consultation.
The vision arrives amid heightened uncertainty about what an HKS degree can reliably deliver. A month ago, The Crimson reported that some students looking for federal jobs see HKS’s pipeline into those roles as narrower and more volatile than it once was, amid fewer job openings, a more politicized hiring climate, and a “tumultuous economy” that makes lower public-sector pay harder to choose.
That uncertainty sits alongside HKS 2036’s broader diagnosis: governing institutions built for the post-World War II era are struggling to keep up with rapid technological change and deepening polarization. The report argues “the way we govern no longer matches the way we live.”
HKS 2036 is the school’s vision for how it intends to respond. As a vision document, it’s a promising first step toward a coherent direction for the school and aligning a complex institution around a shared set of priorities at a decisive moment. The question now is how that vision will be translated into measurable action over the next decade.
The Short Version: What You Need To Know
Here’s the TL;DR. For a deeper analysis of each point and what it'll take for this HKS strategic vision to succeed, skip to The Deeper Dive below.
HKS released HKS 2036, a 10-year vision organized around eight goals: three focused on strengthening the School’s academic core, four strategic “imperatives,” and one focused on alumni engagement. The four imperatives are:
Create a path to public service for all
Help government deliver for people
Harness technology for the public good
Forge principled and effective leaders for polarized times
The school plans to educate more individuals who can’t come to Cambridge, but the funding model is still unclear. HKS says it will “substantially” expand financial aid and broaden its reach through new online and part-time options and executive education that “travels,” but it doesn’t share how those expansions will be financed at scale at a time when HKS has faced “significant financial challenges,” and conducted layoffs in 2025.
HKS calls for more viewpoint diversity and “free and rigorous inquiry,” but doesn’t acknowledge where the school currently falls short. The report says HKS will recruit faculty, staff, students, and speakers with diverse experiences and perspectives and teach students to lead across disagreement, but it doesn't clarify how this imperative builds on, or differs from, existing HKS efforts.
HKS aspires to lead on AI and emerging technology policy — and it's the plan's only quantified bet. The Master in Public Policy (MPP) program is launching a new technology concentration, HKS is exploring a specialized degree in technology and policy, and the plan sets concrete targets: educating 600 public sector technologists and 6,000 technology-minded leaders over the next decade. That’s roughly 11% of the people HKS currently reaches annually through degree programs and executive education. No other imperative has outcome metrics attached.
HKS 2036 is strongest as an aspirational statement of direction. Translating it into an actionable plan will require answers to at least three questions:
Will HKS articulate its distinctive value proposition? HKS competes for students, faculty, fellows, and policymaker attention against law schools, MBA programs, think tanks, and others. Most people doing consequential policy and public service work today don’t have training from a school like HKS. Though HKS 2036 offers a broad answer to who the school is “designed for” — “people doing meaningful work” with “a genuine orientation toward the public purpose” — it hasn’t clearly articulated HKS’s edge.
Will the vision get paired with success metrics? The report’s technology targets — training 600 public sector technologists and 6,000 technology-minded leaders by 2036 — is currently its only quantified goal. Not every goal needs to be reduced to a number, but each imperative should be defined specifically enough that, come 2036, there is an agreed-upon basis for judging whether HKS got there.
Will HKS share its progress publicly and consistently? Metrics alone aren’t enough. They’re useful only if HKS reports against them openly and consistently. A school that says it wants to rebuild public trust in institutions needs to model the accountability it preaches. That means publishing progress in a centralized place, on a regular basis.
The Deeper Dive: 1636 Forum’s Key Takeaways & What To Look For Next
HKS wants to expand access, but it’s unclear how it will pay for that.
A core claim of the report’s imperative to “create a path to public service for all” is that student access is the biggest limit on HKS’s impact: barriers like cost, geography, work obligations, caregiving responsibilities, and visa status are “not a reliable proxy for talent, but for access.” This narrowed pipeline shapes who ends up in public leadership.
Its response is twofold: (1) “substantially” expand financial aid so more public-service students can graduate with “without significant debt,” and (2) expand non-residential pathways — for example, with more online offerings, executive education “that travels,” and new part-time or non-residential degree and certificate programs.
HKS has already begun expanding its pipeline through new efforts like its American Service Fellowship, which offers full scholarships to 50 U.S. public servants and military veterans to receive a Mid-Career Master in Public Administration (MC/MPA).
The report doesn’t say whether expanded executive education is meant to generate revenue or primarily to expand reach. Elsewhere at Harvard, executive education has largely been seen as a revenue lever. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, Harvard Business School reported executive education generated $253 million in revenue — or 22% of its total revenue. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Harvard’s School of Public Health hired a new vice dean explicitly “to bring in more money through new certificate programs, short courses and executive education.”
In FY23, HKS reported it ran 87 executive education programs and “distributed nearly $2.9 million in discounts and funding support,” though didn’t share its revenue or losses.
What to look for:
Will HKS make “reach” measurable (e.g., tracking growth in non-residential participation, scholarship dollars, and representation across all 50 states or new countries)?
How will HKS fund expanded reach when the school has recently been under “significant financial pressure,” and even conducted layoffs in 2025?
HKS may face questions about whether its existing technical expectations of students and professors are sufficient for the kind of technology training it envisions.
HKS says it will add a new technology concentration to its MPP program, built around what it calls ”triple fluency: in technology itself, in the systems that govern it, and in the ethics and leadership needed to debate and determine its future.” (MPP students complement the core curriculum with a required concentration — a defined set of courses in a policy area.)
The news raises a practical question about the pedagogical approach of the concentration: what baseline technical competency will HKS assume, or require, for students who pursue this concentration?
HKS has confronted this tradeoff before. Around 1980, the MPP eliminated its calculus requirement as part of a shift “toward praxis,” lowering the technical floor and reshaping what courses could cover and how they were designed. Today, the MPP program requires “evidence of quantitative proficiency” such as “success in undergraduate-level economics, statistics, or calculus courses.”
HKS 2036 also says the school will explore a specialized degree program in technology and policy and integrate emerging technologies “into our broader curriculum.”
Faculty capacity will be a gating factor. HKS 2036 calls for “cluster hires,” coordinated groups of new faculty designed to build depth in a field, rather than adding isolated individuals. HKS has begun: computer scientist Stephen Casper (AB ’21), who recently completed his PhD at MIT, joins as an assistant professor in July and wrote on social media that “with others (some TBA) at HKS,” he is “looking forward to helping academia offer guidance for governing the next chapters of AI.”
What to look for:
Will HKS raise the technical floor for the MPP, at least for students who elect the technology concentration, if HKS’s goal is to produce graduates who can operate credibly across technology and governance?
Will HKS build a more technical degree pathway beyond the MPP concentration to support its goal of training 600 technologists? This could mean creating a specialized degree akin to the Master in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID), or a joint degree with the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Will HKS build and support a robust faculty cluster to support this push?
HKS wants “more” viewpoint diversity — but doesn’t diagnose where it falls short today.
The goal of HKS 2036’s third imperative — to “forge principled and effective leaders for polarized times” — is to build a culture of “free and rigorous inquiry” through recruiting people who bring diverse experiences and perspectives, encouraging “honest debate,” and teaching students the skills to lead across disagreement.
What’s missing from this imperative is a current-state assessment of viewpoint diversity at HKS. The report doesn’t indicate where HKS believes it falls short today (in curriculum, faculty or student representation, guest speakers etc.), though some of HKS’s shortcomings are already publicly known. Many of the speaker disruptions and deplatformings that hurt Harvard score in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) annual free-speech rankings happen at HKS — for example, those of Israeli Ambassador Michael Herzog and Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng.
The report also doesn’t specify what would count as progress by 2036. Without a clearer baseline and a clearer picture of what HKS is trying to change, it’s hard for HKS to know what it should prioritize fixing, or for anyone else to tell whether it has improved.
An honest baseline assessment is especially important because HKS has been highlighting work in this area even before elevating it as a central imperative. The theme of HKS’s most recent magazine edition was “leading across difference,” and it showcased efforts like HKS professor Tarek Masoud’s Middle East Dialogues, where he models respectful, rigorous debates with guests of different viewpoints, and HKS professor Julia Minson’s (AB ‘99) training in constructive disagreement for HKS students.
What to look for:
Will HKS publish a baseline of where it believes viewpoint diversity falls short today and define what “free and rigorous inquiry” would look like in practice by 2036?
Will HKS think through the sequencing of its imperatives? For example, if it plans to train governors across all 50 states using HKS research, will it first ensure the content reflects the viewpoint diversity it says it wants to model?
Without more details, it will be difficult to know if the report’s goals are being achieved.
In only one of its four imperatives does HKS 2036 set concrete targets: HKS says it plans to train 600 public-sector technologists and 6,000 “technology-minded” public leaders over the next decade. In most other cases, the report’s goals are harder to evaluate because they lack outcome metrics or other clear measures of success.
For example, HKS says it will launch a 50-state platform to support governors and their leadership teams with research and insights, executive education, and access to talent. But participation alone (e.g., “HKS trained governors in all 50 states”) is a process metric. A more meaningful test would be whether governors and their teams find the training and support useful for the problems they face, similar to how HKS has published satisfaction ratings of its executive education programs.
What to look for:
What specific initiatives and organizational changes will HKS undertake to achieve the report’s aspirations?
How will HKS communicate progress going forward? WIll it publish centralized, regular progress updates with clear indicators of whether it’s on track to meet its 2036 goals?
HKS 2036 outlines, in Dean Weinstein’s words, “initial steps” for how HKS plans to meet this moment. Now, to fully rise to the challenge it sets out, HKS will need to hold itself to the same standards of measurement and accountability it teaches its students to expect from other institutions.
As the report itself argues, meeting this moment “requires leaders who are willing to make weighty decisions under uncertainty and be held accountable by the people they serve.”
If you found this Special Edition valuable, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support 1636 Forum’s mission.