ST. LOUIS — St. Louis University will stop offering a master’s degree in planning and urban development.
Sarah Coffin, a SLU associate professor and planning and urban development program director, said SLU was the last area university to offer a master’s degree in planning.
“There are no planning programs, period, in the region now that ours is shutting down,” Coffin said.
The program launched in 1998, and Coffin teaches many of the courses in the program along with one other instructor, Development Strategies co-founder Bob Lewis. Coffin said the university will maintain a certificate in planning and allow students currently enrolled in the program to complete their degree, which takes three semesters for a full-time student.
With dozens of municipalities in the St. Louis region, many of which have their own planning department, there’s a fairly high demand for planners here, Coffin said. That’s on top of developers and other agencies that also tend to hire people with planning degrees, she said.
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“Area employers are going to have to figure out how to recruit from other programs around the country and convince people to move to St. Louis, which is not always an easy thing to do,” Coffin said.
In addition to providing a pipeline for area employers, she said the program also gave students, even those who don’t stay, exposure to St. Louis-centric issues. The Tower Grove Farmers Market was a former student’s capstone project. Other students have been looking at problems in Kinloch as part of a joint class between the planning program and SLU’s law school.
She said SLU administrators decided to discontinue the program because of the small number of applicants. Part of the issue, she said, was that it never received accreditation from national planning organizations.
About five people enter each year, and three or four graduate, Coffin estimated. Just four students graduated recently, but all secured jobs before they had finished their courses: one by the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, one by Trailnet, and one by St. Louis County. Another is a social studies teacher adding planning to high school curriculum.
In a statement, SLU said the decision “was the result of a collaborative, inclusive and evaluative process.”
“The decision to close a program with low enrollment is not a reflection of the value of faculty and students in the program,” SLU said. “This program has served our students well, and the University is fully committed to supporting current students in completing their degrees at SLU.”
St. Louis Alderman Tina Pihl, who was elected last year and often references her own planning degree, said “every big city” should have a planning program.
“I hope they may reconsider how important it is for this city,” Pihl said. “We’re at a pivotal point, too, for this city in terms of looking at economic development and incentives.”
Last year, the University of Missouri-St. Louis cut its anthropology department, a doctorate in math and suspended its political science doctorate program. The University of Missouri-Columbia also cut many degrees in 2018.
“It’s a symptom of a bigger problem with higher ed, it’s not just SLU,” Coffin said. “These little small programs all around the country are struggling.”
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June 15, 2022 at 06:15AM
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