Urban Planning as a Career Preference for Students: Efforts to Improve Awareness about the Profession

Abstract

A professional awareness challenge persists in the urban planning field in North America, resulting from students’ unfamiliarity, parents’ misperceptions, and school counselors’ non-recommendation of the planning profession as a potential career for students. With significant declines in enrollment and diversity in planning programs over the last decade, overcoming this professional awareness challenge is imperative. This paper argues that university planning programs and departments’ steps toward creating the needed platforms via Design and Planning Language Programs to build awareness among youth to pursue planning in their education and as a profession needs to be expanded and consolidated through research.