It seems like the fastest way to get into a vigorous debate, if not an outright argument, with your fellow surveyor is to bring up the topic of the baccalaureate degree as a mandatory criterium for licensure as a professional land surveyor. I know what you are thinking—was this missive stowed away in a footlocker since the Nineties and dragged out just yesterday, all yellowed and dusty? While I might have been, this editorial isn’t. Like it or not, the issue is back.
Full disclosure: I arrived at the profession in the ‘old breed’ way—fell into a surveying job at 19, served on a 3-person field crew, learned to be a rodman, then to take field notes, then to operate a variety of instruments, then eventually became a junior party chief. By this time, Surveying was in my blood, and I sat for and passed the L.S.I.T. exam, after four and half years of experience. I moved into the office where I was lucky to have a group of L.S.’s who felt mentoring was part of their job description and two years later I sat for and passed the L.S. exam. I, and many others, even up to today, have served as a counterfactual to the idea originally mooted in the early eighties, that formal education should be a requirement for licensure. Funny story: once, at an annual conference circa 1998, I found myself sitting at a luncheon table directly across from a prominent western professor while he told the group that those without college degrees were dinosaurs. He pronounced that the sooner these dinosaurs got out of the way, the better off his students and the profession would be. I reflexively reached for my butter knife, but my buddy kicked me under the table as a subtle way to tell me not to kill the nice professor. I grabbed my water glass and took a drink through clenched teeth, instead. I must admit that I admired the good doctor’s zeal and the consistency of his message throughout his years at the school. I eventually came to see that he wasn’t wrong, or not completely, anyway.
But now, twenty-some years later, our numbers would appear to be declining. The huge influx of formally educated professionals that would summon the death-knell for us dinosaurs, never came. I’d like to point out that we had better address this issue before we reach the point of no return. I fall into the last two years of the Baby Boomers (I’m a Dino-boomer—hooray!) and generational populations after us have significantly fewer representatives. Recently the US birth rate fell below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family. Uh oh, that points out serious trouble coming in a few years. But back to the present – the Boomers are retiring, (or worse) at a speedier clip than the profession can keep up with by applying any normal recruiting process. Frankly, the degree requirement may represent a choke point, the small end of a funnel. And if declining general population isn’t enough bad news, there is also an undercurrent of concern with many of the college programs out there. Everyone has heard a rumor about this program or that one—enrollment numbers are down, no one wants to attend live classes, especially in the far-away towns where survey programs always seemed to set up shop. Qualified professors are scarce and getting scarcer, schools are reluctant to spend money on a program with 20 graduates a year, when they can invest in Medicine, Law or even Journalism. Oh, and has anyone else noticed the trend away from formal college education and toward technical school that today’s young people are embracing? It’s been in the headlines a lot lately. I suggest you read up. (Try starting at the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.) Don’t look now but Survey Education may be in a spot of bother.
Over the years I have certainly come around to the idea that a four-year degree is a good idea. In my time serving on the NSPS Foundation and as one of the founders of the NALS Foundation, I have supported education, scholarships, and student competitions, putting my time and my money where my mouth is. But I never thought, nor do I think now, that the singular route to licensure should be through a bachelor’s degree. And I think the numbers are backing me up. It’s time to talk (again) about, gulp, an alternative path to licensure.
Okay, so the twenty percent of you that are still reading this can exhale. I support advanced education as we all should. I support continuing education, as we all should. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the latter is more important than the former. We need to be life-long learners to survive as surveyors and 30 or so professional development hours over a two-year period is not that much of a commitment. But some of those states who have passed legislation, which ripened into regulation requiring matriculation, seem to be having second thoughts these days. So how about meeting in the middle? What about an associate degree and a satisfactory amount of experience? And, what about looking harder at the experience requirement on the applications? I most assuredly advocate for more rigorous evaluation of experience in all circumstances.
Education, whether of the degree or continuing variety, is surely an irreplaceable component of a successful career in Surveying, no doubt about it. This is especially so with the diminishing opportunities for mentoring, (remember, I hinted that the Boomers are dying off). But regardless of the program, the subject matter that seems most important, from my perspective is business related, ethics related, and project management related. All of those can be obtained through an Associate program. Most people with a background that includes field and office experience can handle the technical challenges of Professional Surveying. Does anyone really need to know how to compute a least squares adjustment long hand in 2024? I have one word for you (or maybe two, I’m not sure) StarNet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating push-button surveying. I am advocating that we identify our shortcomings, perhaps by using disciplinary statistics provided by our state regulatory boards, and focus on emphasizing formal education in those areas.
Ultimately the question is: what do professional societies, i.e., us, want? Do we want to see Land Surveying continue as a vibrant profession, a ‘calling,’ a great way to make a living that is open to anyone with a brain and the requisite amount of drive? Or do we want a smaller, more closed profession, more akin to chartered accountancy; an impervious wall between us and the technicians that we manage and that many of us used to be? Is the only way to make competent Professional Land Surveyors to mandate a BS? Are there people you know that possess every single quality you would want in a Land Surveyor except for that degree? Should there be a path for them? I don’t know the answers, heck I barely know some of the questions, but I do know that we’d better start talking about this pretty soon or parts of what we have always known to be Surveying will be calved off and assigned to others as a reaction to our diminishing footprint.