Associate Degree in Landscape Contracting

What's Landscape Contracting?

Landscaping is a skilled profession involving the transformation of outdoor spaces to enhance beauty, functionality, and value.  Landscape contractors manage and coordinate a team that includes designers, installers, salespeople, and cost estimators. 

The skills a landscape contractor must learn include:

Design—Expressing construction ideas as 2D and 3D models to communicate ideas

Landforming—Knowing how much energy is spent to create grades and flats

Plant Selection­­—Understanding which plants are best for the climate and purpose

Hardscaping­—Installing paved paths, patios, and stone walls

Cost Estimation—Sourcing materials at the best prices to provide bids on a job

Customer Communication—Explaining your designs and their benefits in plain language

Business—Accounting for the costs involved in running a profitable small business

Management—Ensuring a safe and productive teamwork environment for workers

The Stockbridge Advantage

At Stockbridge School of Agriculture, we “learn by doing.”  Our curriculum rewards hands-on learners and people who enjoy working outside and building projects large and small. 

Students use actual survey equipment in the field to map outdoor spaces, and then diagram those spaces in our state-of-the-art design studios.  You’ll receive design challenges in which to let your creativity unfold within specified constraints, and learn to defend your choices when presenting your blueprints.  You’ll work in our assembly space with a full range of professional landscape and construction materials.  Students in our program regularly contribute to projects on campus, including tree plantings, inlays of paved brick, irrigation system repairs in our sustainable rooftop garden, and installation of an experimental green roof. 

Unlike most landscaping programs, business, and business communication are integrated across our curriculum, and then highlighted in a Business Concepts course where you'll lay out on paper the expenses and budget areas of a small landscape company.  Your ability to communicate your design ideas is what will set you, as a professional landscaper, apart from the crowd.

The Stockbridge focus on sustainability means you’ll be considering the costs of high-energy work such as grading slopes of land, how much water is lost or retained due to your selection of plants and trees, and which construction materials offer the most sustainable paths forward.  Lessons on plant identification are applied across our plant-rich campus and tree arboretum.  After a lecture on how landscape systems work, you’ll apply that knowledge to an actual built project.  Sustainability is a lens through which we think about all topics.

Careers in Landscape Contracting

Landscape contracting, like the other green industries, is a fast growing field, in which skilled labor and knowledge are in high demand.  Jobs are plentiful, but there is a need to produce knowledgeable professionals who can fill those jobs and turn them into careers.  The highest wages await graduates in New England and around coastal cities.

The goal of the Landscape Contracting program is to prepare students to become crew leaders, project supervisors, and estimators, as well as to hold other managerial positions. In two short years, you’ll graduate with skills in design, estimating, installation, and management.  After working for a landscape business for a few years, many of our entrepreneurial graduates go on to start their own landscape companies.

Our curriculum is designed in collaboration with landscape employers to ensure that we teach the skills they are seeking to hire.  You’ll develop foundations is three primary areas: landscape design, horticulture and plant selection, and the business of landscape construction.  Your coursework prepares you for MCLP Certification through the Massachusetts Association of Landscape Professionals.

In the Spring and Summer of your first year, you’ll complete a 5-month internship, an opportunity to learn-and-earn while working for an established landscape company.  You’ll graduate with field experience eon your resume and a relationship with at least one employer.  Many of our internships are provided by alumni of our program.  They know the skills we teach, and they want the first opportunity to train and hire you before someone else does.

Our best landscape contracting students compete in timed events at the National Collegiate Landscape Competition each Spring, where they are watched and judged by employers.  Some return from their Spring break with job offers.  Your fellow students will become your professional colleagues, and will often work together and/or refer landscaping jobs to each other in the field.

New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) Tution Break Program

Students who are residents of Connecticut, or Rhode Island, are eligible for reduced tuition through the New England Tuition Break Program.  Learn how to claim your NEBHE Tuition Break if accepted.