Degrees earned by faculty teaching in soil science preparatory programs at universities in the USA

Abstract

In the early 2000s some were concerned that few soil science graduate students were receiving their bachelor's degrees in soil science. However, no studies were conducted to investigate this or how it may have changed over time. Information available on university webpages for faculty in the United States was used to determine the faculty's bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree disciplines. Faculty rank was used to determine if a change had occurred in the percentage of faculty who received their bachelor's degrees in soil science over time. Only 16% of faculty teaching in programs that prepare graduates to work as soil scientists received their bachelor's degrees in soil science. This percentage increased to 56 and 67% who received their master's and doctoral degrees, respectively, in soil science, but about 26% of faculty who teach in soil science preparatory programs did not have any degrees that could be identified as a “soil science” degree. The degrees that faculty received their training in also differed by their current soil science specialty area. About 13% of assistant professors and 20% of full professors received their bachelor's degrees in soil science, so the percentage of students entering soil science graduate programs with a bachelor's degree in soil science appears to have declined with time. However, a majority of soil science graduate students having bachelor's degrees from other fields also appears to have been common going back at least several decades.

Bachelors-Level Soil Science Training at Land-Grant Institutions in the United States and Its Territories

“…degree to work as soil scientists, and the OPM criteria clearly state that the federal government will hire individuals with related degrees that include enough credit hours in soil science to work as soil scientists. The same is also occurring in the hiring of soil science faculty at universities across the United States (Brevik and Vaughan, 2018, 2019), and Ferris et al (2010) noted that there is little uniformity in the degrees that prepare students to pursue a career in soil science.…”

Soil science education: A multinational look at current perspectives

“…By the 1950s, it was also common to see land‐use planners applying soil survey information to their work, and the information contained within those surveys evolved to reflect this (Simonson, 1989). The influence of this period is seen to the current day, with many soil scientists in the United States and Canada earning their degrees from biology, engineering, forestry, geography, and other related programs (Brevik & Vaughan, 2020; Krzic et al., 2018). Another shift arrived in the 1980s as environmental issues became more recognized, and soils were increasingly included in environmental work (Brevik, Homburg, et al., 2016).…”