2018 Conference

Poster Presentation

Forestry education in the United States has been hailed for its ability to prepare students in the technical skills needed for a career in forestry as much as it has been criticized for ignoring the human dimensions of the discipline. In the past two decades, forestry education has been uniquely stagnant in its inability to adapt to changing social phenomena such as population growth, urbanization, and the increasingly global nature of the discipline. While forestry education and curriculum has been thoroughly analyzed at the undergraduate level, no such analysis exists for graduate curriculum. This study analyzed the course content of graduate level forestry programs at public and private institutions in the United States through a quantitative content analysis to determine what curriculum disparities exist and how future course content can be improved. A dictionary was developed and coded into three categories to classify graduate courses into the following groups: Science/Technology, Economic/Utilitarian, and Social/Ethical. The dictionary used key words to systematically classify each graduate level course with the exception of special topics, directed studies, thesis, and independent research credits with non-descriptive course titles. This study concludes that graduate programs put significant emphasis on scientific and economic understanding of forest topics while social curriculum is persistently lacking or absent across universities and states. Suggestions for improvement follow.