Program details and sample curriculum
The Environmental Economics, Management, and Policy major builds upon the broader base of general Applied Economic Management.
Agencies and organizations that address problems of rural poverty, natural resource usage, and provisions of public services to non-urban areas require this training. Students are trained to understand and appreciate the economic and non-economic aspects of resource and environmental problems.
Examples of common core and major requirement classes
- Rural and Regional Development Policy: Description of rural areas, their economic structure, and conditions for broad-based economic development. Emphasis on the role of markets in the development process. Introduction to tools to evaluate policies and programs, identify distributional impacts, identify appropriateness for long-term sustainable development, and analyze tradeoffs between policy goals.
- Environmental Law: Principles of law involved in environmental issues, survey of environmental litigation, and legislation and administrative rulings. Law topics include natural resources, water pollution, private land use, air pollution, toxic substances, food, drugs, pesticides, and biotechnology.
- Environment and Sustainable Development Economics: The course teaches sustainable development through an exploration of hard and soft green schools of thought. Hard Green Strategies – reliance on markets, technology, property rights, and human ingenuity to increase production efficiency versus Soft Green Strategies-adoption of simpler lifestyles, government subsidies, natural design of buildings (biomimicry), and urban infrastructure to locate public transportation hubs nearest to densely populated neighborhoods to decrease consumption of natural resources.
- Environmental Economic Analysis and Management: Quantitative methods and computer-aided tools used in the economic analysis of environmental/natural resource issues. Economic concepts and analytical tools will be applied to realistic, problem-solving situations. Topics include cost-effectiveness analysis, benefit-cost analysis, economic simulations, and statistical analysis.
Sample curriculum
TOTAL Credits = 120 credits
Undergraduate Catalog Course Descriptions
- Fall Semester: AAEC 1005, ENGL 1105, MATH 1025, Pathways 2 class, Pathways 4 class = 15 credits
- Spring Semester: AAEC 1006, AAEC 2434, ENGL 1106, Pathways 4 class, Pathways 2 class = 15 credits
- Fall Semester: AAEC 3015 (1 credit), AAEC elective, ACIS 2115, COMM 2004, Pathways 6-Design class, Pathways 7 class = 16 credits
- Spring Semester: AAEC 3004, AAEC 3324, Pathways 5F class, Minor/Area of Specialization class, Pathways 6-Arts class = 15 credits
- Fall Semester: ENSC 1015, STAT 3615, AAEC elective, Minor/Area of Specialization class, Free elective = 15 credits
- Spring Semester: AAEC 3314, AAEC 3024, AAEC 3014, ENGL 3774, Choice of: AAEC 4504, AAEC 3514, ALS 4614 or GEOG 2084 = 15 credits
- Fall Semester: AAEC 4324, AAEC 3424, AAEC elective, Minor/Area of Specialization class, Minor/Area of Specialization class = 15 credits
- Spring Semester: AAEC 4314, AAEC elective, Minor/Area of Specialization class, Minor/Area of Specialization class, Free elective (2 credits) = 14 credits
You will learn the following key skill sets from this major
- Economic analysis
- Resource management
- Policy and impact analysis
Potential careers
- Environmental economist
- Sustainability officer
- Environmental consultant
- Environmental policy analyst
- Environmental lawyer
A highlight of companies who hire our graduates
- American Farm Bureau Federation
- CropLife America
- Delta Air Lines
- Department of Labor
- Harvard University
- Georgetown University
- IBM
- John Deere Company
- Johnson & Johnson
- KPMG
- National Corn Growers Association
- Norfolk Southern
- Northrop Grumman
- Syngenta
- U.S. Government, and more...