Urban Planning as a Career Preference for Students: Efforts to Improve Awareness about the Profession

ABSTRACT

A professional awareness challenge persists in the urban planning field in North America, resulting from students’ unfamiliarity, parents’ misperceptions, and school counselors’ non-recommendation of the planning profession as a potential career for students. With significant declines in enrollment and diversity in planning programs over the last decade, overcoming this professional awareness challenge is imperative. This paper argues that university planning programs and departments’ steps toward creating the needed platforms via Design and Planning Language Programs to build awareness among youth to pursue planning in their education and as a profession needs to be expanded and consolidated through research.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• pedagogy
• diversity
• community engagement
• outreach

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Samantha McLean for her contributions to an earlier version of this article. We would also like to thank the students and faculty at the University of Cincinnati who worked tirelessly on ACE and City Transformers. Finally, we would like to thank the planning faculty, students, and alumni who are doing this outreach work for taking the time to share their stories with us and helping to further this valuable work.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The discussions here are based on information derived from email and telephone conversations with key persons related to the programs at the various institutions. These conversations took place in 2019.