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.

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 to sit for the Massachusetts Certified Landscape Professional (MCLP) certification exam through the Massachusetts Association of Landscape Professionals (MALP).  With additional coursework in Horticulture and two years of experience, some graduates will seek Massachusetts Certified Horticulturist (MCH) certification through the Massachusetts Nursery and Landscape Association (MNLA).

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.

Why Invest in a College Degree in Landscape Contracting?

Many parents and students wonder about the return on investment (ROI) of a college education.  They ask "Is it worth it?  Does one even needs a college degree to become a landscape contractor?  I know a landscaper who just did it straight out of high school."  On the surface it can appear as though the answers are ‘Its not worth it," and "No you don’t need a degree to become a landscape contractor."

Taken from a slightly different perspective, the answers quickly turn into YES its well worth it, and YES you need a college degree to become a professional landscape contractor.  What is that perspective?  It is simply the perspective of time.  

Our alumni who have this perspective, from years working in the industry, will attest that it is well worth the investment as the education helps to position graduates for attaining careers that have greater opportunities for professional advancement and income.  Many of them once called themselves "landscapers" but were confined to mowing, yard work and maintenance, while professional landscapers took on the more exciting skilled work of designing and building spaces, using land gradation, plant selection, and construction of hardscapes like patios.

These same alumni will tell you that the education they received at the Stockbridge School of Agriculture , in subjects like Botany, Soils, Entomology, Pathology, Construction and Surveying, is applied in their jobs on a regular basis. This foundation of knowledge and skills is not easily learned in the field. The educated individual, trained in these skills, becomes a far more valuable employee with the potential for career advancement.  Stockbridge offers one of the most prestigious degree programs in Landscape Contracting, and is highly regarded throughout the industry.

Clients are becoming more and more discerning while selecting  professional landscape contractors. As bids are made and contracts awarded, the landscape professional's capability to fulfill multiple project requirements becomes an important measure of success. Earning the Stockbridge Associate Degree in Landscape Contracting builds the foundation needed to be successful as a professional landscape contractor.

New England Tuition 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 New England Tuition Break if accepted.

Option to Transfer to a Bachelor Degree Program

While most graduates will find skilled employment in the field, you'll also have the option to transfer into an allied bachelor degree program without the need to re-apply.  Depending on the bachelor program you select, associate degree courses will transfer in and satisfy some of the bachelor degree requirements.

The bachelor degree in Landscape Architecture can be completed in just three more years, allowing you to graduate with both an associate degree and a bachelor degree in just five years.  Some students choose to complete a minor, or a full bachelor degree, in Sustainable Community Development.  Others may pursue a bachelor degree in Natural Resources Conservation or Environmental Science.