This fall, Daniel Webster College created a new major program in Homeland Security, with courses such as Acute Stress Management, Sociology of Disasters, and Ideology, Conflict, and Terror. According to the Boston Globe, 35 students have entered the program, which will give them a Bachelor of Science degree. Daniel Webster has joined about 300 schools across the nation that offer programs in terrorism and homeland security.

“It’s about the fastest-growing area in academia,” claimed Boston Globe’s source Stanley Supinski, the director of the partnership program at the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security. He went on to say that, of the 300 programs, about a third are aimed at mid-career workers returning to school, with the rest split evenly between master’s, bachelor’s, and associate’s degrees.

A homeland security program not only appeals to students who feel passionately about September 11, but those who are looking for a secure job after school. The US Department of Labor predicted that job prospects in security management are growing faster than any other field, giving homeland security degree holders the opportunity to secure jobs with the Department of Homeland Security, various federal and state agencies, and even businesses who are growing increasingly concerned about security.

Steven P. Lab, however, the director of the criminal justice program at Bowling Green State University, disagrees. He argues that students have a better chance of getting work if they specialize in a specific area. He told the Globe the homeland security program “is a hodgepodge of topics that have already existed on college campuses for the most part … none of these people are going to be marketable when they go out into the workforce.”

School officials at Daniel Webster College and other institutions believe that college students who study homeland security will be better equipped to help prevent tragedies, as well as foster communication between government agencies and private businesses that control power, water, and food infrastructure. The program focuses on all hazards, whether natural or man made.

Students majoring in homeland security spend a year concentrating on a specific geographical area or language, and are required to complete a field internship. Twice during the program the students will conduct a security audit of the Daniel Webster campus, which lies adjacent to an airport. Rick Johnson, a former Air Force officer hired to be head the program, stresses in the Globe article that it is not about terrorist-hunting, “Terrorism is one element of homeland security.”

Michael Fishbein, the provost at Daniel Webster who was the force behind creating the new major, began thinking about homeland security soon after September 11, believing that the government did not spend enough time and effort trying to understand terrorism or how to respond to it. “That was out motive,” he said. “To educate students, you have to understand the nature of the threat.”