Hal Salwasser, Dean and Director of Forest Research Laboratory, College of Forestry, Oregon State University
The College of Forestry at Oregon State University shares recent trends in enrollment with other forestry schools. We are down about 10% in undergraduate and about 15% in graduate students over the past five years (trends vary by year). More alarming, we have experienced 25-38% declines in new students in our programs over the past five years. At present, we have about 340 undergraduate and 135 graduate students enrolled in degree programs that are administered by about 70 tenure and tenure track faculty. These trends in forestry enrollments have occurred during a time when overall university enrollments at OSU have grown by more than 25% over the five-year period. With administrators and supporters looking for ways to cut declining programs and invest in areas of growth, these are hardly reassuring trends.
Two years ago we set out to reverse our enrollment trends and attract more students to forestry degree programs. One year ago we embarked on a strategic planning process to strengthen our programs overall. What follows is a brief description of how we are working to build a brighter future. This is the framework, not the details. Time will tell whether we are successful.
We start with the notion that the university and our college produce three fundamental products of value to society: People, Knowledge, and Innovations. These products are needed to address long-term, multi-scale, complex, dynamic challenges in building human capacity to sustain healthy and vital communities, economies and environments. The people are our faculty and staff and students, both while they are at the university and after they leave to enter life's many avenues. We want our programs to provide great places to work and learn and we want our people to emerge competent, creative and adaptive. We expect our people to make a difference through their impacts in whatever venue they choose to operate.
Knowledge is the intellectual capital that our university creates and/or captures from elsewhere and imparts to our students, faculty, staff and constituents, especially the capacity for continued, lifelong learning. This knowledge impacts the world by not only informing people about that world but by enabling people to think in ways they could not think without this knowledge; to open people to the magic of creative thinking.
Innovations include those in science, the arts, humanities, and technologies. Innovations transform the world and we expect our people to use their knowledge and innovations to create a world of communities, economies and environments that is markedly better than the world that would have existed without our "products." In other words, we aim to have impacts that are visible, exciting and worthy of enticing the best and brightest to come to OSU and join us in our vision.
In summary, we aim to have impacts through People who make a difference, Knowledge that informs and enables, and Innovations that transform the world into a better place to live.
Some people might read what I have said so far and say, okay but how does this relate to forests, forestry and its allied professions. Can't we just invest in the new economies, the knowledge economies and let the old traditional natural resource businesses fade into the history books? Here is what I tell them.
Every morning, 6 ½ billion people awake, ready to eat, ready to clothe themselves, ready to secure their shelter, and ready to engage in a day of life that depends vitally on the products and services of farms, forests, and oceans; they need food, they need clean water, they need wood and paper, they need breathable air, they need fibers of all sorts, they need energy, they need the environmental services of healthy natural ecosystems, and they need opportunity to create a better life for their families. Even now, not all of these 6 1/2 billion people have access to all of the basic resources they need for a decent life. We have much work to do to boost the basic quality of life for at least 2/5 of the world's existing population. In fifty years this number will be 9-11 billion and they will probably need or want more of all these goods and services. Whether they are in the "new economy" or the "old economy" or the "yet to be economy," they will need these fundamental resources for life or they will not exist, or they will exist at much reduced qualities of life. By the year 2050, if we have not succeeded in doing some major reversals in land use transformations, the people of this planet will have shrunk and polluted the land area and the area of clean surface waters able to provide their food, wood, fiber, water, and other resources placing unimaginable stresses on our environments, economies and communities. We will not let it turn out that way!
We can and must make our future different than the one that disinvestments in natural resources would create. The people, knowledge and innovations that come from our universities devoted to natural resources -- broadly defined to include resources from forest, marine, agricultural and range ecosystems - can create a world that sustains future populations with simultaneous improvements in our environments, communities and economies. And they can do this in ways that nurture and sustain the cultural diversity that must persist to keep humanity vital and adaptive. To do this, the natural resources will need the services of the new economies, we will need biosciences, technologies both high and low, and advances in the arts, humanities, business and communication sciences to augment our advances in natural resource sciences and management in order to create a world better than the one we now experience. Come to (name your university) to join in this vision!
How we are setting out to attract students, faculty and staff to revitalize the College of Forestry at Oregon State University is, in a business sense, marketing. That is, we are working to align our products and delivery programs with the needs and expectations of those who demand those products and programs. And we are working to make sure our "customers" know what our products are and what value they deliver. Here is the framework of our strategy.
1. Create renewed excitement for forests, forest vocations and allied professions. Forests cover about 8-9 billion hectares of the Earth's land area, nearly 30% less than they covered prior to agricultural and industrial revolutions. Over the past 100 years, forestry has succeeded in meeting growing demands for industrial wood while reversing the trends toward deforestation in temperate and developed countries. We can and will make much greater progress there in future years, amazing progress in productivity and efficiencies in fact. But we must turn the tide of deforestation in tropical and underdeveloped nations as well. We have an opportunity and a strategy, a Global Forest Vision if you will to accomplish a Great Restoration of the world's forests by 2050; meeting people's growing needs for wood and fiber while also protecting the most significant natural forests and assisting people who live in close associations with forests sustain their unique and desired lifestyles. Its natural and its high tech; its science and its culture; its dirty and its inspiring. You can make a difference like nowhere else on Earth! There's a powerful story here and we are beginning to tell it in ways that will excite people to join in the cause.
Here are just some of the ways we are doing this at OSU:
2. Embrace and capture all the employment prospects in forestry. Traditional wood and fiber production forestry will have fewer jobs in the future than it had in the past because the industries have moved beyond labor-intensive, primary industries to highly automated, high tech, managed forest enterprises. The jobs in this sector will be demanding of articulate, highly skilled, adaptive workers. Meanwhile, forests managed to restore healthy ecosystems, those managed for multiple uses, and those managed to protect and preserve nature will require more skilled workers and foresters with some very non-traditional skills. The job market will be more diverse, more important, and more global than it has been historically. If forestry schools do not embrace this new market, some other schools will step into the void and produce the graduates to fill the market. If they don't know much about forestry, the forests and all the people who depend on them will be worse for the experience. We would be foolish to abdicate this opportunity just because it isn't the kind of forestry we grew up with.
3. Invest in continuing professional education. This is about making old students into new students, expanding our perception of what the potential student body is. Success in the rapidly changing world we inhabit will be a direct function of how often and how quickly people retool for the latest in technology, ideas, and tools while retaining their knowledge of place and their cultural identities. Forestry
4. schools that lead in continuing education will be recognized as meeting the market needs and they will be supported; they will probably be in high demand.
5. Boost the integration of sciences, humanities, business, technology and communications. We must simultaneously educate and train people for special skills and give them the capacity for breadth and adaptation. Curricula of the 21st century will integrate depth in specialty with breadth in capacity. Business and communications will augment traditional disciplinary skills.
6. Provide visible leadership in the public arena on sustainable forestry. People in the U.S are highly skeptical of government agencies and industry and environmental group propaganda. I cannot speak for other countries. But here, a void exists for the credible purveyor of balanced, objective information on conditions, trends, options and consequences of options regarding forest resources. Academia must step into that void to retain its position as the place to seek and find the best, most truthful information. If we sit on the sidelines while the warriors of disinformation slug it out, we will be increasingly perceived as irrelevant. If we don't actively correct the falsehoods being thrown about by political agendas or ideological advocates, we could be accused of withholding vital information that societies have invested in us to provide. But caution is in order here. We must not allow ourselves to become enamored with the limelight of notoriety. We must advocate for the full use of relevant information, knowledge and appropriate uses of technology. We must help inform people on policy options. But when we step over the line to advocate for particular policy choices, then we must make clear that we are but one among many voices opining about values. We can and should help shape the dialogue without unduly forcing it into narrow allies that close off legitimate choices. At OSU we are doing this through the Sustainable Forestry Partnership with other colleges on campus and other universities around the US. We are actively engaged at many levels in the rationalization and refinement of Sustainable Forest Management Systems and their approaches to certification, especially their scientific bases.
7. Finally, we are aggressively building external resources to offset the declining state support we are experiencing. To us, this means securing private gifts, developing research cooperatives with businesses and government agencies, and even acquiring forest properties that we can manage for research, teaching, demonstrations and revenue generations. Our goal is to grow and diversify our portfolio of financial resources to better enable us to weather the ups and downs in any one sector.
These are my thoughts on how to attract students to forestry by making it an exciting place to be. There are certainly other thoughts that would work and some of these may not work in all cases. They may not even work for us in a year or two. So we will continually look at what we are doing, measure our progress and make adjustments as needed. When we meet again in two years, I will look forward to giving you a progress report.
