Educator-employer partnerships: A tool for improving environmental health education

Partnerships between employers of environmental health graduates and the schools that produce those graduates can help overcome three of the most serious challenges currently facing undergraduate environmental health programs: employing qualified faculty, ensuring the relevance of the skills and knowledge developed by environmental health students, and motivating students to learn. One form of partnership, in which students work on real problems faced by employers, can be particularly useful in a variety of courses. The authors present several examples that have been used at Illinois State University.