Trend: Homeland security as a job sourceHomeland security-related college courses bolster graduates' job chances

Recession or no recession, one area of job growth is homeland security, broadly defined. Take the story of James Davis, as told by Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger’s Chris Joyner. Davis hopes to get a job with a professional sports team when he graduates next year with a master’s degree in sports management from the University of Southern Mississippi. To make sure he gets a sports-related job, Davis, 23, has chosen a concentration in sports security management, a new concentration at Southern Mississippi and part of a growing number of homeland security-related academic programs. Davis said he believes the extra security credential will make him a more marketable candidate when he graduates. “It has to, with the level of terrorism where it’s at,” he said.

Joyner quotes David Silverberg, editor of HSToday, to say that there has been an explosion in homeland security programs since DHS was formed in 2003. “Homeland security has developed as a discipline, and it took time for people to realize that it was a discipline,” Silverberg said. “People think of homeland security as just screeners at the airport and it is way more than that.”

In the spring of 2007 DHS published its first educational directory with a list of eighty-one institutions with homeland security programs. Joyner writes that the most recent directory published last fall had nearly twice that number.

Silverberg told Joyner that the growth in academic programs mirrors the job market. DHS employs more than 200,000. Every state, and practically every municipality, have their own homeland security and emergency response agencies. In the private sector, too, growing awareness of homeland security and business continuity needs now make homeland security-related courses a plus on one’s resume.

Here are some examples:

George Mason University offers a doctorate in biodefense, which the university says teaches “intelligence and threat assessment, nonproliferation, and medical and public health preparedness.”

Purdue University founded its Homeland Security Institute in 2002 as an interdisciplinary program. Director Eric Dietz said the coursework offered through the institute is designed as an enhancement to traditional fields of study like engineering and agriculture.

Lou Marciani, director of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Spectator Sports Management, has been an athletic director for five universities and worked for the federal government evaluating security threats for sports venues. His faculty includes a former FBI counterterrorism expert who managed security for the 2004 U.S. Summer Olympic team and a professor whose doctoral dissertation was on security measures for sporting events. “It’s a new discipline,” he told Joyner. “When I came through as a student I didn’t take any classes in sports security.”