Education: Emergency Management and Homeland Security Aren't the Same

"I want to help protect our country from terrorists," is the comment I hear most often from prospective students looking to get their degrees in homeland security.

Most of them, however, end up really wanting a degree in intelligence or emergency management - with a few outliers in criminal justice, security management, national security or public administration, pretty much in that order. But in light of dozens of discussions I've had with such students in the last five years, distinguishing between a degree in homeland security and emergency management is too limited.

In its narrowest and most literal sense, protecting the country from terrorists is the function of law enforcement, intelligence and military special operations. This means the degrees to pursue would be criminal justice, intelligence and military studies - not what most prospective students had in mind, although a few are looking to actively pursue the "bad guys."

Because the definitions and degrees in emergency management and homeland security are limited, I will dig deeper into the various degree programs and disciplines to provide you with a better understanding.

Deciphering Specialties
Emergency management and homeland security are not the same, nor are they two differing views of the same core competencies. They draw on some of the same supporting specialties, they are both multidisciplinary by definition and regularly overlap, especially at the operational or post-event level.

To use a very crude and rather limited set of comparisons:
· Emergency management is very local and is about preserving life, property and, with voter approved limitations, ensuring freedom.
· Homeland security starts as far from home as possible and is about denying freedom to those who believe violence and intimidation are legitimate means to an end.
· Building on that, emergency management is a specific and critical function of local government, while homeland security is essentially, but not solely, a federal government function.
· Using a different lens, emergency management focuses on science, facts and the environment in its broadest sense, while homeland security focuses on people, beliefs and ideology.

Though these are all imperfect comparisons, they provide a starting point for evaluating the two interdisciplinary degrees, and they allow us to explore other areas and degree programs that help define and differentiate these two career paths.

The critical and recognized specialties - degree fields in bold form the core for the programs - that intertwine to create an emergency management degree program include:
· Criminal Justice
· Communication
· Emergency Medical Services
· Fire Science
· Logistics Management
· Public Administration
· Public Health
· Public Safety
· Security Management

The critical and recognized specialties that intertwine to create a homeland security degree program include:
· Constitutional Law
· Criminal Law
· Intelligence
· International Relations
· Military Studies
· National Defense
· National Security
· Political Science

A Little Bit of History
The emergency management field is still young, and the homeland security field is essentially a post-9/11 phenomena. Understanding the current landscape and how we got here will also help you recognize why there is such a lack of similarity between programs and program titles, and why so many are amalgams, some of which seem contradictory.

Emergency management and homeland security are applied or professional degrees, distinguishing them from traditional degree programs. Few schools are in a position to start two new, yet so closely allied, degrees simultaneously, and even fewer can undertake such efforts in new areas that lack a proven record of generating new registrations.