09/19/06 College Ag Students

College Ag Students. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Classes resume this month at colleges and universities across the Northwest, and that means more students pursuing an education in agriculture. OSU`s College of Agricultural Sciences offers a variety of academic pursuits that are associated with Oregon`s ag industry. OSU Dean Thayne Dutson says graduates sometimes end up back on the farm or ranch, but not always: DUTSON: Some people think agricultural sciences and then they think farming, ranching, and that`s about it. But we have so much science and so much heavy science in our college, that students who get degrees in our college can go a lot of different directions. Certainly, many OSU degrees are directly linked to production agriculture. But a majority of graduates from the College of Agricultural Sciences pursue a long list of careers that range from journalism to toxicology. Even some specialized careers in agricultural banking and real estate are available to the 16-hundred or so ag school students: DUTSON: In the last 15 years, our college has almost doubled in size relative to number of students. That`s both graduate and undergraduate. A high percentage of employees at the Oregon Department of Agriculture also carry degrees from OSU`s College of Agricultural Sciences. With the agency`s diverse program areas ranging from food safety to natural resource protection to marketing, the OSU educational experience has been valuable to the department. Dutson says the ag school at Oregon State University is a critical part of the university`s mission: DUTSON: The College of Agricultural Sciences is the largest college relative to the number of faculty and staff and also the largest relative to the number of research grants and contracts that we bring in. Dutson says the College of Agricultural Sciences does graduate students who end back up at the farm or ranch, but a majority of graduates end up in ag-related fields away from the farm: DUTSON: Only about ten percent of our graduates go back into production agriculture. But they do go into some of the support systems and various other parts of the agriculture and food system. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.