The growth of a legal marijuana industry has prompted schools to launch academic cannabis studies, covering crop management, chemical extraction and management of cannabis businesses.
The country singer Corb Lund has a new song, based on his visit to a cannabis dispensary in Colorado. As the title of “Old Familiar Drunken Feeling” suggests, he wasn’t impressed with the wares, but that’s not what we’re here to discuss. Instead, it’s this verse:
We were met with a kid, born for his job, highly skilled and desirable
Who up till now the world had found to be totally unhireablе
He knew the strеngths and the names, every hybrid strain that modern science has allowed
He said you don’t have to toke it, you don’t even gotta smoke it
’Cause they make it for ya edible now
Those are clever lines, and the video accompanying the new song depicts the dispensary clerk as a stereotypical stoner straight out of Central Casting. There’s one thing amiss, though: The picture this paints isn’t true.
I got some indication of this last month when I made a trip to Philadelphia to see one of my favorite bands, The Monowhales. When I got off the train at the William H. Gray III Broad Street Station, one of the first things I saw was a sign advertising a new program at Delaware Valley University: “Certificate in Cannabis Studies.”
Keep in mind that Pennsylvania is a state where cannabis — what we used to call marijuana, pot, weed, reefer, wacky tobacky, the devil’s lettuce — remains illegal with the exception of medical marijuana. (By contrast, Virginia has legalized personal possession but not retail sales.) So what in the world is one of the state’s universities doing pushing a program on cannabis studies?
It turns out that this isn’t unusual. Based on multiple interviews with both people in the cannabis industry and schools across the country, it appears there may be as many as 40 such cannabis studies undergraduate programs across the country and maybe 15 more at the graduate level. “Within a decade we’ve gotten to the point where we can’t even count them,” says Michelle Rutter Friberg, director of government relations for the National Cannabis Industry Association. (Fun fact: She’s a James Madison University graduate who once interned for Del. Tony Wilt, R-Rockingham County.)
That rough count of 40 schools does not include those that might offer a class here or there on cannabis as part of a larger field of study. For instance, Virginia Tech offers a class called “Cannabis — science, industry and culture” as part of the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences.
Why in the world are schools teaching cannabis studies, you might wonder. For the same reason they’re teaching computer science and welding and nursing: This is where the jobs are. A report last year by the cannabis-focused website Leafly said that cannabis-related jobs had increased by 33% over the previous year — the fifth straight year that job growth has been 27% or higher. That report counted 428,059 cannabis-related jobs across the country. A subsequent report earlier this year said the number of cannabis jobs had slipped due to inflation but was expected to rebound as the economy improves and more states legalize cannabis. That 2023 report projects that the retail value nation’s cannabis market is expected to double by 2028, from $29.2 billion to $59.3 billion. That report didn’t offer a national employment projection but did offer some for specific states. It listed Virginia as the state with the fourth biggest potential for job growth in cannabis, behind California, New York and New Jersey.
“With more than 8 million residents, Virginia’s true cannabis demand is similar to that of Washington State, $1.4 billion to $1.6 billion,” the report said. “The state’s medical marijuana dispensaries currently sell about $110 million in products every year, supporting 1,700 jobs. That means Virginia’s cannabis consumers are spending more than $1 billion every year, almost all of it on the non-regulated market” — a point often made by those who say Virginia needs to set up a legal retail market, so that this money isn’t going to a black market of drug dealers. The report said that Virginia’s total job potential, currently counted at 1,742 jobs, could be as high as 28,600 jobs. For context, that’s just slightly smaller than Amazon’s total employment in Virginia, according to IBIS World. The industry report also said the jobs being created range from $16 per hour for trimmers and packagers to six figures for some managerial positions. The pay for extraction technicians was put at $45,000 to $90,000 and grow managers at $65,000 to $90,000. ZipRecruiter says most cannabis industry jobs have annual salaries that fall between $54,496 and $73,008 a year.
“This isn’t a group of hippies who are growing plants in their basement,” says Sara Payne, vice president for government affairs for the cannabis company Jushi. Or, as Jennifer Maden, assistant dean for the College of Business at Rowan University in New Jersey, puts it: “It’s a legitimate industry.”
And, like any industry, it needs employees who aren’t directly connected to production. “They need accountants, they need people in marketing, they need people in data analytics,” Maden says. And in my conversations with cannabis industry executives, the phrase I kept hearing over and over was the same one I hear when I talk to more conventional business leaders here in Virginia — a “talent pipeline.” They want to make sure they have one. “There’s a lot of interest in making sure there’s an educated workforce available,” Payne says.
In effect, we’re seeing the creation of a brand-new industry — at least a brand-new legal industry. That industry has employment needs, and some universities are seeing opportunities to help fill it with cannabis studies. In some cases, these are short-term credentials programs (such as what you might get from a community college in Virginia). In others, they are four-year minors or even majors. And then there are those schools offering master’s degrees. The nature of those programs vary — some focus more on the horticulture of growing cannabis, others on the chemistry of extracting the chemical that produces the buzz, still others on the business behind it.
Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, became the first college in the country to offer a cannabis-related program when it launched a cannabis chemistry program in 2019. The account that Steve Johnson, dean of the College of Science and the Environment, gives is typical of the half-dozen universities I contacted as part of my research. Five years ago, Johnson says, “We were tasked to sit down and come up with some of the employment needs of the state.” One of the industries that popped up was cannabis. “We already had medical marijuana,” he says. Adding that to the chemistry program made sense. “The students are very much chemists when they’re done,” he says. While their focus may be cannabis, “If they need to shift directions they can because they have the same toolbelt.”
Of course, that’s not always how the public sees things, Johnson says. “Jimmy Fallon made fun of us on the ‘Tonight Show.’ ‘When you graduate, you get a bag of Cheetos’ — a joke. It’s so far from that. They [students] come for cannabis, they leave as chemists.”
And highly paid ones, too. “We can’t produce graduates fast enough,” Johnson says. “They’re making more money in two years than faculty with Ph.D.s.” The American Chemical Society has given the program its official stamp of approval.
At the State University of New York at Morrisville, the story is similar. “The writing was on the wall that New York was going to legalize cannabis,” says Jonathan Jankowski, who teaches agricultural business in the school’s horticulture department. Ditto at Lackawanna College in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “One thing we do at the college is we watch workforce training and if there’s a new industry, that new industry will need trained workers,” and then the school tries to respond, says Bill Schoen, who oversees the school’s Office of Continuing Education. Lackawanna’s interest was especially heightened when Jushi opened an indoor growing facility for medical marijuana in Scranton. “They employ upwards of 250 people in a very sophisticated plant, everything from seed to extraction,” he says.
Lackawanna partnered with Jushi to design the program, and that’s paid off for both. “We hire aggressively out of that program,” Payne says. She estimates that maybe one-third of Lackawanna’s cannabis students are offered jobs even before they graduate. “Having a ready workforce is huge. … The need is our talent pipeline ranges from entry level with a high school degree to Ph.D.s.”
Although Steve Earle makes growing weed “up the hollow” sound easy in his song “Copperhead Road,” the commercial reality is much different. “The cannabis plant is really complicated,” Jushi’s Payne says. “To get a healthy crop, with a reliable good yield and consistent chemical composition, that’s a tough thing to do. So coming in with some formal experience of how you manage on a commercial level to make sure you keep the yield up, that the quality and chemical composition is consistent from harvest to harvest, that makes a big difference.” (Payne, a lawyer by training, teaches a class on compliance at Lackawanna as an adjunct. She also calls herself a “Republican soccer mom” who doesn’t smoke or drink but believes legal cannabis is necessary to regulate something people are going to consume anyway.)
Cannabis companies aren’t the only ones benefiting from these cannabis studies programs. Some schools have seen enrollment increases that appear to be tied to the interest in the cannabis programs. At SUNY Morrisville, “it’s more than doubled our numbers” in the horticulture program, Jankowski says, from 36 to 77. At Stockton University in New Jersey, the number of students in cannabis programs has grown from 20 in 2018 to 90 today. At Lake Superior University, there are now 100 students (out of a campuswide total of 1,400) in cannabis programs. “I wish we had more space to put them through quicker,” Johnson says.
Adding some of these cannabis programs isn’t easy, though. At Lake Superior University, where the emphasis is on chemistry, “we made a significant investment in the program — northward of $4 million in instrumentation,” Johnson says. At all the schools I talked with, students work with hemp, not marijuana. Both are cannabis plants and look the same, but hemp lacks the chemical that produces the buzz. “We describe it as the difference between sweet corn and field corn,” says Jankowski at SUNY Morrisville. That eases some regulatory issues (marijuana remains illegal under federal law) but not all. The plant is heavily regulated, no matter what form it takes, and that regulation is often complicated. In Pennsylvania, for instance, hemp is regulated by the state Department of Agriculture, while medical marijuana is regulated by the state Department of Health.
And then there’s that federal ban, which makes some schools skittish about doing anything that might risk federal funding. “Many schools won’t advertise cannabis companies” on their job boards, Rowan’s Maden says. “That makes it hard for them to recruit.” Where companies can, though, they recruit enthusiastically. Rowan University, which has a master’s program in cannabis commercialization, recently held its first recruiting day for cannabis companies — 11 firms sent representatives. “It was a smashing success,” Maden says. Many students came away saying, “I didn’t even know there were jobs like this.”
You’ll notice that all the schools I’ve cited are outside Virginia, which raises a question: Will we see any Virginia colleges add cannabis programs? There’s nothing stopping them now. Some of these out-of-state schools started their cannabis programs before personal possession or a retail market was legalized in their states. Virginia has already done the former and seems headed toward the latter, it’s just a matter of how quickly. As part of the deal to lure Amazon’s second headquarters to Virginia, the state promised to ramp up its production of computer science grads. If we’re really talking about cannabis as being an industry of similar size, will any Virginia college take the lead in trying to train those future cannabis industry workers?
One of the sticking points between Democrats and Republicans over retail cannabis is social equity — Democrats have wanted to give preference in licensing to those with marijuana convictions, Republicans think that’s just rewarding lawbreakers. Because of racial disparities in marijuana arrests over the years, this is often seen as a racial issue. Here’s a possible compromise: Virginia could make sure that if there are any cannabis studies programs in the state, they’re at a historically Black university — such as Virginia State University, the other land grant school in the state that federal authorities say has long been underfunded. No one seems to have an official list, so I won’t claim my research is complete, but I couldn’t find any cannabis programs at a historically Black university. Perhaps Virginia could be the first?
