Twenty-five years after the first college-level program earned legitimacy through accreditation, construction education is feeling the highs and lows of maturity. A discipline that not many ever thought could be an academic subject now is offered at as many as 170 universities and officially recognized at more than 60. When Vernon L. Hastings began teaching construction at Arizona State University in 1973, the school's vice president of academic research told him that it was not an academic subject and "should not be on a university campus," Hastings recalls. Today, "C-schools" are producing thousands of graduates each year and employers are scooping them up, as well as pumping more company time and money into school curricula, equipment and facilities.
But construction education still copes with painful realities–that the discipline is an academic stepchild to larger progams on campus, that it lacks financial strength and its graduates technical depth, and that its welter of titles can leave students, recruiters and guidance counselors confused and uninterested.