Community Development program to become Community, Urban Studies, and Planning

It’s official: the undergraduate Community Development (CD) program is getting a makeover. Beginning in fall, the CD program will become the Community, Urban Studies, and Planning (CUSP) program. 

Polls of current CD students showed that many chose the major because they saw it as a pathway into other public service-oriented careers such as affordable housing or climate justice. This, combined with the departure of several faculty who carried the bulk of the School’s CD knowledge, motivated the program’s name and curriculum changes. 

“We decided that shifting to something that emphasized urban studies and planning made a lot of sense,” says Matthew Gebhardt, the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the TSUSP. “We talked to a lot of students and graduates of the program, and that’s what we were hearing as well. Some focus still on community was very important.…That was reflected in the name.”

Changing the name of the CD program will signal its new, broader scope to potential students, and it will better reflect the expertise of the faculty. By including the phrases “urban studies” and “planning” in the name, folks interested in those or related fields will have an easier time finding the program. “CUSP” will also reflect the core classes of the curriculum: UNST 220 Understanding Communities, USP 300U Intro to Urban Studies, and USP 311U Intro to Urban Planning.

One key change to the curriculum is the shift from Areas of Community Development to Areas of Specialization. Students will now be required to choose one of four areas to specialize in: Climate, Environment, and Health; Community Development, Organizing, and Advocacy; Housing, Land, and Communities; and Planning, Design, and Development. These topics reflect the scope of the faculty’s knowledge and offer the students the option to choose which topics are the most interesting to them.

Another impactful change is that Field Experience, the CD class that offered real-world experience, will now be an elective instead of a requirement. Interested students will collaborate with University Studies to choose a Senior Capstone plan that includes direct interaction with communities. The plans will be developed around existing programs at the school that have experienced faculty and established community partners. This way, students will get the support system they need to conduct their hands-on community work.

Those currently enrolled as CD majors will not be heavily impacted by the switch to CUSP. They will be able to either stick with their CD major or choose to switch to CUSP. If they stick to CD, the only credits that may need to be substituted would be the Practice credits. If they switch to CUSP, they will have to fulfill all of the program’s requirements in order to graduate.

The CUSP program is not just about planning. It will offer a more flexible bachelor’s degree opportunity for folks who want to learn both general information about public service and specific knowledge about fields within the realm of public service.

“Students going through the program can still go into community development, organizing, advocacy, those sorts of things,” says Gebhardt. “It does open more doors in terms of planning, but broadly speaking, we’re aiming toward public service-oriented careers.”

For more information about the CUSP program, click here.

See the chart below for a quick overview of the credit differences between the CD and CUSP programs.