Ponder This: AU Horticulture Grads Batting 1000 in Job Market
News headlines in May painted a bleak picture for the nation's 2003 college graduates, warning that a "shaky," "rocky" and "tough" job market was making employment prospects for the class of '03 "slim," "dim" and "grim."
That might have been so for most May graduates, but not for the 22 Auburn University students who received their degrees in horticulture. They all had good jobs waiting on them, with an average starting salary of $32,000 a year.
And it wasn't just a fluke with the spring 2003 class, either. Every year, for almost two decades now, every AU horticulture graduate has gone straight to work in a job he or she has chosen from an average of six solid offers. Most of the positions are as management trainees, many with some of the biggest landscape and nursery companies and businesses in the state, region and nation.
A 100-percent job placement rate year after year after year is a rarity simply unheard of in any school or college, at any university, anywhere. It is a remarkable feat, one that AU horticulture professor Harry Ponder says all boils down to the most fundamental of all business principles.
"If you consistently deliver a superior product, your product's going to be in demand," says Ponder, who earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in horticulture from AU in 1970 and '71. "Landscape companies have learned that when they hire Auburn graduates, they're getting the best. It never fails: They hire one, and they're going to want more."
Witness, for instance, the on-campus horticulture interview program the department hosts each semester for seniors. Representatives from 20 select landscape companies across the U.S.–and it's only 20 because Ponder limits it to that–travel to Auburn to talk career opportunities with AU horticulture majors.
"These are the big companies, the ones that have locations all over, the ones that can hire eight or 10 graduates a year, and their top folks come here because they want Auburn people," Ponder says.
Every senior also gets a job packet that includes the names and addresses of more than 300 companies that typically hire Auburn horticulture graduates.
The Department of Horticulture's perfect job placement record didn't occur by happenstance. It is the result of a rock-solid curriculum, a top-notch faculty–and a network that Ponder launched in 1979, shortly after returning to his alma mater as a faculty member.
Through the years, the AU horticulture department, though recognized as one of the best in the nation, never had attracted throngs of students. In the late '60s, Ponder had been one of only about two dozen students majoring in horticulture, and aside from a jump in the early '70s–in what Ponder calls "a false blip created by the 'flower child' era"–enrollment had remained low. That just didn't make sense to Ponder, and now, as a faculty member, he was determined to figure something out.
"I started looking at what we were doing to help our students after they graduated, and basically, we weren't doing much," Ponder says. "Professors would let students know if they heard of a company that was looking for somebody, but that was about it. With the encouragement of the department, I decided to start focusing on placing our graduates in good jobs."
Ponder had grown up in the horticulture industry–working alongside his dad, Glenn, at the family nursery and landscape business near Dadeville–and as a result knew quite a few horticulture folks around the state. Connections became the name of the game.
"I started talking with students one-on-one, finding out what they were looking for in a job or if they wanted to live in a certain area, and then I'd say, 'OK, I know so-and-so at such-and-such a company over here, so why don't you send them a resume,'" recalls Ponder, whose office quickly became the department's unofficial resume-writing and interview-prepping resource center.
Meanwhile, realizing that AU horticulture majors–who already had the advantage of a superb education–would become even more marketable if they could flesh out their resumes with some impressive work experience, Ponder and his fellow faculty members lobbied for and eventually got CoAg Dean Simmons' approval to establish a horticulture internship program.
Things were in place, and the system gradually started working. Within the industry, AU horticulture graduates became a hot commodity, first in Alabama, then the region and nation. Companies hired AU grads expecting the best, and they got it.
Back on campus, enrollment in the Department of Horticulture steadily began to rise.
"In 1985, our department had just 3 percent of the College of Agriculture's total enrollment," Ponder says. "By 1990, we had 20 percent, and today, 30 percent of the students in agriculture are in horticulture."
For the past seven years, enrollment has totaled 200-plus–which for now is capacity-level.
"We're extremely careful to keep our enrollment in line with our resources, and until we're in the position to add more faculty, we're at our limit," says Ponder, who, in addition to his teaching responsibilities is the department's undergraduate program coordinator and, not surprisingly, its job placement and internship program coordinator. "We will not jeopardize the quality of our program."
Already, to keep classes and labs small, the department has had to offer more sections of several classes. Ponder, for instance, used to teach one ection of his arboriculture class per semester; now he has three.
He also teaches courses in landscape bidding, estimating and management; retail garden center management; and a "careers in horticulture" class that was added to the curriculum when enrollment began increasing. Says Ponder, "It got to where there were too many students for me to sit down with them one by one and help them with resumes and cover letters and interviews, so now we have a semester-long class to work on those things."
When he enrolled in AU's horticulture program in 1966, Ponder's plan was to return to the family business.
"But I was teaching Sunday school one Sunday, and after church, my dad told me, 'Son, you were born to be a teacher,'" Ponder recalls. That's one piece of fatherly advice he took and has never regretted.
He earned his Ph.D. in horticulture from Michigan State University in 1975 and worked as Extension horticulturist for metro Atlanta until the opportunity to join the Auburn faculty came his way.
His dad was right: Ponder is in his element in the classroom. Ponder says if there's any secret to it, it's that he just flat out loves his job.
"I want to see students get enthused about being in horticulture," Ponder says. "I want them to see how everything I'm teaching is practical and have them say, 'Hey, this is something I'm actually going to use one day."
When former students passing through Auburn drop in to see him, as they frequently do, Ponder hauls them into the classroom.
"I'll get them to talk for 10 minutes or so, tell what they're doing now and how not long ago they were sitting right where the students are sitting," Ponder says. "That seems to help students see the big picture."
Ponder's focus is always on the students as individuals.
"This job placement thing, it isn't about going for some kind of record," he says. "It's about preparing these students and helping give them the opportunity to make the most of their lives."
At the risk of sounding hokey, Ponder says AU horticulture is one giant family. In fact, the department has two reunions a year–one during the Southern Nurserymen Association's annual trade show in Atlanta and the other at the Gulf States Horticulture Expo in Mobile–and at least a hundred alums from all over the country show up for that.
"It's this broad network that's spread all over the country, and all the generations are tied together," he says. "Whether you graduated a year ago or 50 years ago, there's some kind of bond."