Courses

Concepts, strategies, and techniques of local economic analysis, planning, and development; decision-making exercises.

Social organization and change in communities; use of sociological principles in analysis of community problems and development.

Understanding theories, concepts, and frameworks of community and economic development and community decision-making models in application to community development practice and issues.

Exploration, understanding, and application of leadership roles, strategies, and principles in group and community settings.

Understanding the interaction of population characteristics, land use, municipal funds, and taxation in a locality and how they impact the operation and management of government jurisdictions.

Understanding and applying methods and hands-on experience with techniques used in community and economic development.

Course outlines the steps for students to apply CEDEV theories and methods to a topic in writing their master's paper.

Descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing, power, estimation, confidence intervals, regression, one- and 2-way ANOVA, Chi-square tests, diagnostics.

Creative projects, including nonthesis research, that are supervised on an individual basis and that fall outside the scope of formal courses. CEDEV 596 is intended to provide a structure to allow CEDEV MPS students to work on their final paper or project. (CEDEV students need to complete CEDEV 580 before being enrolled in CEDEV 596.) MPS students can be registered in this course for 1, 2, 3, or 6 credits to work on and/or complete their final project report or paper. (CEDEV students need to be enrolled in at least 1 credit of CEDEV 596 during the semester in which they plan to graduate.)

This course is an overview of the field of planning. It examines the history of planning and the theories behind it, and the corresponding roles that planners can play in their communities. It establishes the legal framework for planning as a profession, and examines landmark legal cases involving planning and its tools.

Regional growth and development, focusing on challenges to theory, policy, and practice, emphasizing change in metropolitan, micropolitan, and rural areas.

Understanding connections between communities and surrounding ecosystems; exploration of management techniques for building adaptive, resilient, and sustainable communities and environments.

Entrepreneurship in the Community, empirically and conceptually examines the relationship between entrepreneurs, small businesses, and local economic development. The course examines the multiple definitions of "entrepreneurship," and how these individuals affect — and are affected by — the social and economic dynamics of their community. The course develops a rich understanding of the entrepreneurship process from a community-based view rather than a traditional firm-based view, illustrating the many ways that entrepreneurs and their local society interact. The course begins by examining the role of the firm in society, and the ways that local life enhances and contains opportunity and opportunistic action. Students will also learn ways to measure small business dynamics locally, and develop an understanding of how different community development approaches may affect different types of entrepreneurship

Topics in Economic Development provides an overview of modern approaches to developing places and regions, including policy options and limitations; fundamental reasons for the worldwide decline of some rural areas and the growth of cities are also explored.

Launching ideas from socially and environmentally conscious for-profit businesses, to nonprofits, to spin-offs of existing models.

Provides a strong foundation in theories and concepts of international development that inform practice. Addresses issues of how economic growth and disparity are spatially distributed, differentiated, and what causes these patterns to occur.