The Columbus Dispatch

More colleges scrambling to offer homeland-security majors

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Dorie Turner

ASSOCIATED PRESS

ATLANTA — Next year, Justan Holloway’s class schedule will look like the plot of an action movie: The college student will study international terrorism, disaster planning, criminology, social psychology and Arabic.

Holloway plans to enroll in Savannah State University’s new degree program in homeland security.

The program is among a growing number of its kind as U.S. colleges try to meet rising demand for specialists trained in national defense and emergency management.

Graduates are attractive job candidates to government agencies, defense contractors and other companies.

Some programs focus on terrorism and manmade threats. Others, such as Savannah State’s, also train students to help with natural disasters.

"After the Katrina situation, I didn’t like the way FEMA handled it," said Holloway, 19. "I was like, ‘Maybe I can make a difference.’ "

More than 300 colleges offer some type of instruction in homeland security, a trend that began soon after the Sept. 11 attack, according to the National Academic Consortium for Homeland Security, which started three years ago and is based at Ohio State University.

Steven Lab, head of the Criminal Justice Department at Bowling Green State University, said that awarding degrees in homeland security is pointless because the field is too broad.

"This is a money grab," Lab said. "The federal government decided to pour our money on this, and everybody wants to get a piece of the pie."

The Homeland Security Department spends about $50 million a year on grants to colleges for research in national defense and for science and engineering scholarships.

Many schools created their programs by regrouping existing courses. Colleges also are beefing up public-administration programs and disaster-relief training to produce graduates ready to help cities and states plan for and respond to disasters.

"People asked the question, ‘Is homeland security just going to be a fad?’ " said William Newmann, program coordinator at Virginia Commonwealth University. "Even if we are successful as we can possibly imagine being fighting terrorism, the emergency response and natural-disaster response will be there."

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