Planning
Committee
Reports
Academics
Future Academic Programs:
The proposed School of Natural Resources & Environment will offer a reduced set of four highly interdisciplinary core degrees with flexible options:
- Environmental & Resource Economics & Management
- Landscape Architecture
- Natural Resource Science (new options to include cross-campus collaborators)
- Conservation Biology - new
- Forestry
- Landscape & Restoration Ecology - new
- Natural Resource Sciences
- Wildlife Ecology
- Soil & Water Science - new (tentative title for a new merged degree being proposed and jointly developed by Crop & Soil Sciences and Biological Systems Engineering.
By streamlining, restructuring, and integrating core academic programs, the School can better focus on key academic strengths while still developing several new contemporary offerings that will raise the visibility of our primary programs and increase student enrollments in important new areas.
By using some core curricula and other shared and capstone courses, students will be exposed to a broader range of interdisciplinary training options among departments - while still retaining critical professional and accredited academic programs.
These existing and new offerings will be designed by faculty teams from the ground up to include a coordinated set of complementary minors and new certificate programs for non-degree seeking students.
Natural Resources & Environment Online: The School of NRE will also better support the needs of individuals who cannot attend one of our newer WSU campuses or learning centers. Most people in Washington State do not have the opportunity to directly attend WSU because of the demands of careers, families, or other situations that make them place-bound. The School of NRE will help address this fundamental challenge in higher education by developing a coordinated set of courses to be offered through WSU's Distance Degree Program.
Natural Resources & Environment Online is a proposed new distance degree project that will allow individuals around the state to complete significant portions of their undergraduate, graduate, or continuing education needs through WSU. These DDP courses will support both degree and non-degree seeking students seeing advanced professional training and certificate programs in Landscape & Restoration Ecology and several other areas.
A longer term goal of the NRE Online project will be to eventually offer an online M.S. degree. In conjunction with an expanded list of online courses, the non-thesis M.S. of Natural Resources will be modified and developed to offer a one-year M.S. program oriented toward working professionals returning for advanced training and quick job reentry.
Both the NRE Online project and the one-year M.S. project will be coordinated with existing degree and academic programs so that no new academic entity or degree need be established. Our goal is to leverage existing academic resources in new directions.For more information on the proposed School of NRE, please contact:
Pete Jacoby, Associate Dean, CAHE or
Rod Sayler, Committee Chair