ENABLING ENTRY INTO THE GEOSCIENCES THROUGH GEO-LEANING INTERDISCIPLINARY COURSES

U.S. institutions of higher education face challenges along many fronts that affect geology training. Reductions in public education funding create shortfalls that trickle through university administrative structures as a seemingly non-ending drive to reduce costs. Geology degree programs are squeezed for faculty lines with reduction in tenured positions and an explosion in temporary ones. Low-enrolled programs and courses are eliminated, consolidated or merged with other disciplines. Geology becomes Earth Sciences, or the even broader Environmental Sciences. Yet, workforce demand for geology-training remains high nationwide, creating need to maintain, or re-envision, essential geoscience content in higher education.

Two pervasive conditions contribute to this situation: 1) Merger of geology faculty and programs into other disciplines, makes geology a smaller portion of the program mix. Fundamental content, previously scaffolded into workforce skill outcomes, fragments across multiple disciplinary touchpoints without grounding back into a geoscience application. Other content is abandoned as less relevant to the program. 2) Undergraduate students exhibit increasing limits in reading comprehension, writing with appropriate vocabulary and sentence structure, basic applied math, and organizational and computer software/hardware proficiencies.

To build student retention and address low proficiencies in introductory STEM skills, we added a first-year, one-credit Toolkit course with practice in: a) information organization and computer literacy; b) training in Excel and data use; c) review of mathematical symbols and processes; and d) knowledge and use of scientific literature. To enhance geology outcomes in non-geology majors, we created courses that lean heavily on integration of geology with other disciplines. This includes Medical Geology, Oceanography, Water Resource Management, Hydrology, Nuclear Futures and Legacies, Natural Hazards, Climate Change, Life in the Universe, and Environmental Resource Management. We find that our greatest number of geology job outcomes are in hydrology and water resources, but the other courses attracted enrollments from other science majors and excited more upper-level students to apply to graduate geoscience programs.