Measuring up graduate school as training for conservation practice

Kroon Hall, home of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, founded by Gifford Pinchot in 1900. Image credit, Sage Ross.

Does graduate school adequately prepare students for work as conservation practitioners? A new study in the journal Conservation Biology tries to answer that question through a survey of alumni from the University of California Davis' Graduate Group in Ecology.

The study authors based their research on a long history of complaints that students leave graduate school unprepared to work in the trenches doing professional conservation work. Complaints have centered on the notion that the academic setting places overemphasis on creating future academics rather than teaching the skills and knowledge needed for the careers that most students take on after graduation - field science, land management, non-profit administration, governmental policy and regulation, conservation planning, etc.

To help answer this question, the researchers had 169 alumni fill out surveys ranking various skills in terms of how important they were for the respondents to do their jobs. The alumni included those who had entered academia and those who had gone on to work as conservation practitioners. They also asked the respondents to rank how important it was for each of the skills to be taught in graduate school.

The researchers hypothesized that academics and practitioners would differ in what skills they think are important for their jobs and what skills should be taught in graduate school. This might then explain the gap between graduate education and conservation practice.

Predictably, the study found that indeed there was a gap between the skills that academics and practitioners felt were important in their jobs. Academics tended to place higher value on research-oriented skills while practitioners ranked decision making and policy as more important. Surprisingly, though, both groups placed similar value on what skills should be taught in graduate school.

So this leaves unanswered the question of whether graduated school adequately prepares students for work in conservation and, if not, then why. And perhaps more difficult is the question of what can we do about it. The study authors argue that conservation organizations need to be more active in informing graduate schools about the skills that they need in future employees. However, they recognize a challenge facing graduate education - conservation professions are extremely diverse. For many jobs, the skills and knowledge that an employee would need  is highly specific and lend themselves to learning on the job.

--Reviewed by Rob Goldstein

Source:	Conservation Biology
Title:	Academic research training for a non-academic workplace: a case study of graduate student alumni who work in conservation
Authors:	Matthew Muir and Mike Shwartz
	University of California, Davis.