A master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning enables graduates to work in a variety of areas. A few of the topics planners share an interest in include:
- Social responsibility
- Affordable housing
- Sustainable cities
- Mobility and traffic congestion
- Climate and the environment
- Community development
- Economic development
What distinguishes planners is their ability to work in some or all of these areas. The critical skills, knowledge areas, and values they obtain in a master’s degree program in urban and regional planning, such as ours, permits planners to shift from one area to another as their interests evolve as well as the opportunities shift.
Therefore, the most important thing about the planning degree is the degree itself and less so the specific specialization(s) that a student chooses when they are in graduate school. Nevertheless, the specializations—what we call concentrations—are available to planning students at Iowa and constitute some of the most central career paths in the planning field.
For more on why planners select planning as a profession, the American Planning Association provides a sampling of professional planners telling why they chose the field.