Working for free

Second year MPP students at HKS have to complete a "Policy Analysis Exercise" (PAE) which is basically a year long consulting project with a real client consisting of research, analysis and recommendations for a specific problem or question that the client's organization is facing.

You would think it would be easy to find a client because you are offering free labor from one or a pair of Harvard graduate students. No, finding a client does not seem to be the hard part. Really, how often do you walk by something being offered for free and say "no thanks"? But once the client has been selected and it is time for the project to begin, that energy with which they agreed to take the free help seems to have disappeared. Getting the client to carry their weight in providing background information and access to data and contacts, or just being available to check-in proves to be more difficult.

I don't think HKS would ever consider making PAE clients pay for the students' service but the dynamic between a client and a paid consultant versus an unpaid consultant must surely be different. Though requiring some sort of fee may decrese the quantity of clients showing interest in working with a student on their PAE, I do not doubt that the quality of the relationship and the committment from the client would increase.