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MPA is for public sector administration, government, and in general very large bureacracies. If you have an eye on being a divisional or managing director of a city, state, or federal organization then an MPA is for you. These type of organizations operate fundamentally differently than what you would learn in an MBA program; profitability is something you generally don’t give a wink at in public adminsitration. you merely slice up your budget appeasing as many people as you can. Hence, a lot of an MPA program is to prepare you for conflict resolution, policy writing, and non-quantitative topics, so you don’t do much in the way of accounting, financial analysis (i.e. ROI studies) as you would in an MBA program. You generally have economists who will be the ones doing all that sort of stuff.

MBA programs are for for-profit organizations mostly, and they can extend into non-profits but generally the non-profits are 401c’s or such where they need to generate all their funds internally and they don’t have economists on staff so the top layer needs to be capable business people to make the organization survive by breaking even. Non-profits are also in competition too, so things like business strategy have direct relevant applications. MPA would not even touch the business strategy that you get from any MBA program.

An MBA is mainly focused on working for a business type setting where an MPA is mainly focused on working in a government type setting.

One says public and the other is Business: is this the higher education section or am I being punked? LOL

The P instead of the B