23SOCIETY OF INDUSTRIAL AND OFFICE REALTORS ®
BY STEVE LEWIS
A new perspective on the importance of including real estate
education on an undergraduate real estate curriculum.
By Dr. Elaine Worzala and James Stanton
Reading, Riting, Rithmatic,
and Real Estate
THE FOUR R'S
As the real estate market returns in force there is a growing need for junior real estate professionals that are able to enter the field and hit the ground running. Although there
are masters programs available to many, most of the undergraduate
real estate programs are only available to the upperclassman, and
often times, students are not allowed to take real estate courses
until they are a junior and have a basic finance course under their
belt. This really sets freshmen and sophomores at a loss when they
come in to college looking to get into a career in real estate.
It is our contention that real estate is such an important part of
everyone’s lives, particularly in the business world, that real estate
should become the fourth R. A sound knowledge of reading,
riting, and rithmatic are essential ingredients for success, but a
clear understanding of how real estate markets work and what
the fundamentals are is also an important skill set to have when
graduating from college. Students who start their real estate
education from the beginning of their college career will be much
more prepared when they start their first job. That is, they will be
able to begin to add value to their future employers the first day
they begin working.
At many universities students are not able to take real estate courses
without being accepted into a business school. This is the case at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the older and more
widely recognized real estate programs in this country, and ranked
number one in the 2014 U.S. News and World Report rankings
of undergraduate real estate programs. To get into this business
school you must be a junior with a specified grade-point-average,
therefore the program is only open to the very best and brightest. At
the University of Colorado at Boulder students are able to receive
a certificate in real estate, as well as training for a full broker’s
license but this is again from the undergraduate business major’s
perspective. This curriculum focuses on the principles of real
estate as well as the legal and investment side of the business. At
the University of Connecticut-Storrs, a student can receive a major,
minor, or certificate — but again, these programs are designed for
a business major. On the other hand, there are a few programs
that are starting to accept nonbusiness majors in to their real
estate programs.
The College of Charleston and Colorado State University have
both recently started minors that are open to students outside of
strictly the business school.
Many students are not sure what they want to do when “they grow
up” as they attend college or university. In fact, author James
Stanton originally enrolled in the College of Charleston as a
business administration student, a very broad-based, management
degree.
The finance major was recently approved, so he then set out to get
that degree when he took the real estate market analysis course
as an elective. He absolutely loved the course, as it was the first
course he experienced that clearly had a mixture of both theory
and practice. Whenever a product class or market was studied a
local commercial broker with a vast array of industry contacts
would bring in a guest lecturer that was currently working on large
multifamily projects. It really helps that the School of Business in
Charleston is located just off King Street, a top 10 shopping street
according to 2011 U.S. News and World Report.
