michaelschoon Michael Schoon's Personal Website

As a faculty member in a School of Sustainability (https://schoolofsustainability.asu.edu/), we spend a great deal of time preparing our students for life after college.  It’s a bit different than many other majors.  After all, everyone knows what an engineer or an accounting major can do.  But what does a sustainability graduate do?  What skills do they bring to the table?  I’ve written a great deal about the structure of our curriculum, the training our students receive, and how we prepare them for future employment in the past:

https://michaelschoon.com/2014/04/11/training-students-to-be-solutions-oriented/

https://michaelschoon.com/2014/01/08/a-new-application-of-problem-and-project-based-learning/

https://michaelschoon.com/2013/04/11/a-brief-comment-on-problem-and-project-based-learning-in-the-classroom/

In future posts, I’ll write a bit more on our learning objectives in the school and how we’ve structured curriculum along skill sets that we want our students to take away rather than the topical areas of many other lines of study (environmental or otherwise).  I’ll expand a bit on the New American University at that point as well (for now, see http://newamericanuniversity.asu.edu).

Instead, what I’d like to focus on is something of grave concern to our current students, their parents, and prospective students – job prospects upon graduation.  I’m very pleased to write that tracking all of our students from the first graduates until the past semester, we see the following:

1. We have graduated 448 undergrad sustainability majors.
2. Tracking most of those, 86% of them are employed with another 12% in graduate school.
3. Of those employed, nearly 50% are in a sustainability position or a sustainability field.
4. We have graduated 50 Master’s students and 13 PhDs.
5. All of our grad students are employed.
6. Of our Master’s students, 82% are employed in Sustainability.

So, if you are thinking about enrolling in Sustainability but are worried about finding a job, or if your friends and family are pushing you away from following your dreams toward a more “realistic” path, please take a look at the data first.  Great opportunities await.

For more information, see our Dean Chris Boone’s blog post (http://cgboone.personal.asu.edu/wordpress/) as well as the data on the School of Sustainability’s website, noted above.