International perceptions of university forestry education – an analysis of student motivation, competencies, and curricula

The field of forestry is currently facing numerous challenges. These include new demands from people and organisations with regard to governance and services from forests, ecological and environmental functions, and the global competition and market pressure over forests and its products. In order to provide students with the knowledge, abilities and attitudes required in the profession, universities around the world need to consider the challenges faced by the sector as well as the latest technological and pedagogical innovations. Consequently, a great number of higher forestry education institutions have reformed their programmes or at least initiated their reform processes especially within the last decade. In this context, this thesis investigated the perceptions of students, universities and employers on various aspects of national forestry education and the forestry profession from an international perspective. Particularly, the issues of student motivation, subjectspecific and generic competencies, curricula, and employment prospects were examined. A mixed methods strategy was used, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. The case studies of three Bachelor’s degree programmes in China, Brazil and Finland, and one international Master’s programme, were selected, examining the perceptions of altogether 604 students. This was coupled with a pan-European survey of forestry universities and employers and an extensive literature survey. The study provides numerous findings with regard to the similarities and differences in perceptions that universities, employers and students – across study years and countries – have on forestry education. Among the cross-national similarities, forestry students were highly interested in field studies and the areas of environmental protection and climate change, with a general preference for working after graduation in the area of management of public forests. Across study years, students from later study years gave a higher importance to communication skills in relation to students from earlier years; conversely, the importance given to achieving their best decreased along the years of the degree, signalling certain demotivation. Differences across countries were also found, such as the higher value given by Chinese respondents to autonomy skills, as compared with Finnish students who emphasised communicative skills, and to Brazilians who highlighted instrumental skills. In Europe, both universities and employers saw important gaps between the needs of the job market and the education provided at the universities, especially with regard to environmental services, carbon sequestration, and the ability to communicate. Employers saw a greater gap in relation to universities in areas such as bioenergy, forest products trade and marketing, economics and governance. Based on these and other findings, a clear need for improving current university forestry education is seen. A set of concrete recommendations for the reflection of those involved in the development of forestry education is presented.