Posted on March 19, 2002

Not All Are Created Equal:
An Analysis of the Environmental Programs/Departments in
U.S. Academic Institutions Until March 2002

Aldemaro Romero* and Hanne Eastwood
Environmental Studies Program
Macalester College
1600 Grand Ave., St. Paul, MN 55105-1899
USA

*romero@macalester.edu to whom correspondence should be sent

Abstract  

Environmental programs have traditionally lack definition of their nature and unifying principles.  In order to ascertain how these programs are presently constituted in U.S. institutions of higher education, we surveyed 670 environmental programs/departments between September 2001 and March 2002.  The states with the highest number of those programs/departments were California (58), New York (56), Pennsylvania (48), Massachusetts (40), and Ohio (28), while those with the lowest numbers are Idaho and Wyoming (0), North Dakota, South Dakota, Mississippi, and West Virginia (1), and Hawaii, Kansas, Arkansas, and Delaware (2).  However, when the state population is taken into account and the number of program per 1,000,000 inhabitants is calculated, the results vary greatly for the ones that were at the top in absolute numbers but remain basically the same for those that were at the bottom in absolute number.  Thus, the states with the highest number of programs/departments per 1,000,000 inhabitants are Vermont (23.00), the District of Columbia (13.98), Montana (9.96), Alaska (9.57), Rhode Island (8.59), and New Hampshire (8.09), and while at the bottom we find Idaho and Wyoming (0), Mississippi (0.35), West Virginia (0.55), Alabama (0.67), Kansas and Kentucky (0.74), and Arkansas (0.75).

The names Environmental Science and Environmental Studies are, by far, the most common ones being, between the two of them, 47.62% of the program names.  They are followed by engineering (11.04%), Health/Toxicology (7.61%), and Biology/Ecology/Conservation (6.87%).  The first two are more commonly used in college settings while Environmental Engineering is more common among universities (p< 0.5).  The vast majority of environmental programs fall within the natural sciences     realm (56.12%).  There are 225 programs (33.58%) interdisciplinary in nature because of combining two or all three areas of knowledge, but only 23 (4.18%) are fully interdisciplinary by combining all areas of knowledge.

The mean number of degrees offered per institution was 1.230 for colleges and 1.921 for universities, which was not statistically significantly different (t-test, p< 0.5). A total of 119 colleges offer an internship experience (required or not) vs. 263 universities doing so.  Universities have a statistically significant higher number of programs that require internship opportunities vs. programs housed at 4-year colleges (t-test, p< 0.5).

Between 1900 (the year of the first program created) and 1958, only 14 programs were established.  For the period 1959-1999, there is a dramatic increase in the number of programs being created.  There are two big "waves" in the creation of programs:  one between 1965 and 1976 (with a high peak in 1970) and another starting 1988 and, probably, continuing to this date, with a peak in 1997.  Representatives of the programs surveyed, cited students and faculty demand as the most common reason behind the creation of those programs.

The high diversity of names and emphases found in this study is consistent with the premise that Environmental Studies is a field where there is a lack of unifying principles and clarity of what environmental studies programs should be.  This is a continuous project to be updated on a yearly basis.

Introduction

There is great uncertainty about Environmental Studies (ES) as an academic field and how to design environmental programs for institutions of higher education (Soulé & Press 1998, Maniates & Whissel 2000).  In general, the status of ES programs (ESPs) is characterized by competing proposals.  There is neither agreement as to the characterization of the domain nor a basis for identification and selection of accurate and appropriate subject matter of ESPs (Bennett 1996).

Traditionally, most ESPs have been envisioned as an integrating concept that draws elements from many traditional disciplines, but actual integration or synthesis of that knowledge has been difficult to define and/or achieve.  Thus, it is not always possible to ascertain when that integration is accomplished.  No consensus has been reached on whether ES Studies is a field that can be described as an area for professional and technical preparation, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, metadisciplinary or a discipline in itself (Caldwell 1983, Horning 1996, Jacobson & McDuff 1998, Mattes 1994, McLaughlin 1994, Newell & Green 1982, Schneider 1997, Wilke 1995).  Furthermore, whether or not its teaching must include certain ethical values and what those values should be, have also been a source of discussion (Hunn 1996, Kim & Dixon 1993, Orr 1990).

Despite all these shortcomings, there is evidence that ESPs are increasing in number and importance among institutions of higher education (Kettl 1999, Romero et al. 2000, Maniates & Whissel 2000).  Yet, there have been, to our knowledge, only two extensive, in-depth survey of environmental programs/departments in U.S. academic institutions (Romero et al. 2000, Maniates & Whissel 2000).  Past statistical analyses on their number in higher education have always been vague (e.g., Brough 1992).

The major goal of this paper is to analyze on a yearly bases as many environmental programs in U.S. institutions of higher education as possible as a continuation of our previous work (Romero et al. 2000, 2001).  We continue to study the following characteristics:  1) geographic distribution; 2) number of programs per institution; 3) how those programs define themselves by name (e.g., environmental studies, environmental science, etc.); 4) emphases of those programs by areas of knowledge (natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, interdisciplinary); 5) degree offered (B.A., B. Sc., Masters’, Ph.D.); 6) whether internships and study away/abroad opportunities were offered and if any of those was required; 7) vital statistics (number of students enrolled, number of students graduated in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 number of faculty involved in those programs and the status of those faculty, i.e., number of faculty that:  a) were assigned to the environmental program/department, whether they were b) full-time, c) shared with other departments/programs, d) part-time faculty,  8) year in which the environmental program/department was created, and 9) why the program was created.

Materials and Methods

We define as an environmental program/department any of those that use the word environmental in their title, from the standard environmental studies, science, and engineering to the less common environmental journalism or law.  We also include those that although their names do not carry the word environmental, define themselves as environmental in nature in their advertisement material.

Much of the data presented in this study was collected in the last two years from the previous editions of this paper (Romero et al. 2000, Romero et al. 2001).  In addition to the methods used then, we obtained the most recent information through direct contact with the administrators of the programs themselves via email and telephone.  Administrators of programs for which we had information previously were asked to provide updates, and those who we contacted for the first time were asked to complete the entire survey.  We also visited the websites of particular colleges and universities, and consulted Rodenhouse (2000).  Direct responses (about 50% of the programs surveyed) were compiled.   For those that did not reply to our request for information we based the data provided in this paper on their advertised information either in their web pages or in their brochures.  When there was no advertised information in a specific category, we assumed no changes and left the information as it was in Romero et al. (2001).   Each program was treated as an individual entry for statistical purposes even when there was more than one program for the same academic institution.

Data collection was carried out between September 2001 and March 2002.  To locate the programs/departments, we used online search engines such as Peterson’s guide to graduate schools (www.petersons.com) and Peterson’s CollegeQuest for undergraduate programs (www.collegequest.com).  We also used other sites that carry extensive lists of higher education programs in the environmental arena, such as the web page of the Committee for the National Institute of the Environment  (www.cnie.org) and Second Nature (http://www.starfish.org).   We also looked at Brillault (2000) as a source for environmental law programs.  Other programs were located through their web pages by typing in the words environment or environmental and matching those with the words program and/or department in the following search engines:  Excite, HotBot, LookSmart, Lycos, Snap, About.com, and Google.  In order to locate programs/departments that were more recently created and for which information was not readily available in the sources cited above, we have been scrutinizing job advertisements for academic positions in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Science since September 1999.

Results and Discussion

General:  Results are compiled in Table 1.  We present information on a total of 670 programs/departments in 378 institutions of higher education.  124 of them were colleges and the rest universities, independent graduate schools, and/or law schools.  Of those, 161 (24.03%) responded to our survey, which is about the same for past surveys (Romero et al. 2001).  Those programs are listed alphabetically according to the name of the academic institution to which they belong.   At the end of this Table we list the URL address from each program from which we obtained the initial information, whether or not people from that program/department responded to our survey, the name of the person we contacted or who at least appeared as responsible for the program/department based on his/her title (program director/coordinator, chair), and the email address of that program/department that we used or at least appeared to be the one for contact/further inquiry for that program. 

Click here for Table 1 (Microsoft Excel file).

Geographic Distribution:  The second column on Tables 1, identifies the location of the institution by state.  The programs/departments per state are summarized in Table 2.  In order to see whether these numbers really represent any level of interest for these kinds of programs in the academic institutions of these states, they must be correlated to the population in those states.  Using also U.S. Census Bureau data (http://www.census.gov) as for 18 March 2002, we divided the number of programs/department by the population of that state and region.

Table 2. Number of Environmental programs/departments per state/population