There’s no joint degree program with Booth. There are actually a couple with Harris – the BA/MPP, and the BA/MA in International Relations. Among my kids’ friends, there wasn’t anyone who did the former, but there were three people who did the latter (one of whom is now in a PhD program at the Kennedy School). It was an unbelievable amount of work – they basically all became hermits their fourth years, and none of them actually finished on time (they all needed the summer quarter after their nominal graduation). An MA in IR is not exactly a professional degree, although it was definitely a qualification to work at Washington consulting firms.
Story about Chicago vs. the rest of the world: My kids were in graduate programs at the same time. One was getting an MPP at NYU Wagner, the other effectively a Sociology MA through MAPSS at Chicago. They were both taking the required basic Stats for Grad Students course at the same time, which at Chicago also included all of the Harris students. At NYU, the basic text for the course was the manual for one of the leading social science statistical software packages, and the course consisted of learning how to use the software to produce specific types of analyses (a very useful skill). At Chicago, the course began with a mandatory two-week full-time boot camp on linear algebra and proofs for everyone who didn’t clear an assessment test. Then the course itself was entirely proof-based and consisted of learning the math underlying the software package the other kid was studying. Kid 1 wound up with plug-and-play report-generating and -reading skills she could use in her job, but only a very superficial idea of how the reports were being generated, while Kid 2 might have been able to write a new version of the software himself, but he needed further training if he wanted to generate a practical report.