Graduate Academics

Course of Study

The master’s degree programs each require a minimum of 12 graduate course units. These typically include five required core courses, including a final MA project, two skills courses, and five elective courses to form the student’s field of specialization, yet each program varies.

Our students can take classes from each of IDCE’s four programs as well as other departments at Clark University, including, but not limited to: the Graduate School of Geography, Biology, Women and Gender Studies, Government, the Graduate School of Management, the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Economics.

Student Body

Our diverse student body (with approximately 160 graduate students and just under 100 undergraduate majors and minors) bring to the program a wide range backgrounds, skills, cultures, and interests. 40% of our graduate students are international—coming from over 30 different countries, including Ghana, Egypt, Vietnam, Pakistan, Sudan, China, Nepal, Malawi, Ethiopia, Thailand, Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Ukraine, Ecuador, Turkey, Ghana, Eritrea, Netherlands, Uganda, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Russia, Albania, Rwanda, Peru, South Korea, Angola, and Bangladesh. Most IDCE students have several years of professional experience and have decided to return to graduate school to learn new skills and think critically about their profession.

To help make this possible, IDCE remains committed to an economically as well as internationally diverse student body, even as the cost of private education continues to rise.

Worcester: A Place to Live and a Research Laboratory

Worcester offers students a dynamic urban setting with a reasonable cost of living. The second largest city in New England, Worcester is conveniently located less than an hour from both Boston and Providence, with convenient bus and rail links to New York City and Washington D.C. Built by immigrants in the nineteenth century, Worcester continues to be a bustling destination for new arrivals from around the world as well as a site for urban revitalization. These conditions make Worcester a living laboratory for our research and teaching in spatial analysis, sustainable community development, and environmental policy and management.

The Forefront of Change

The four master’s programs mutually enrich each other, which makes the interdisciplinary education you receive at IDCE unique. Whether creating micro-finance opportunities in Asia, using GIS to predict impact of land use on watersheds, auditing environmental resource management, or organizing neighborhood revitalization in Massachusetts, IDCE graduates pursue careers on the forefront of change.

IDCE students are trained to link theory with practice and to use an integrated approach. This enables our students to turn their ideals into reality and to generate constructive change on the problems that interest them.

For instance, Environmental Science and Policy students examine environmental degradation in Africa in the context of power relations in international development; International Development and Social Change students study the role of technological innovation in poverty alleviation in different parts of the developing world; Community Development and Planning students explore the impacts of environmental pollution on human health. Students in all programs may learn to use GIS and remote sensing techniques to study such issues as delivery of health services, refugee movements and human rights violations, or location of environmental health hazards in a local community.

Through the interaction with each other and with other Clark departments, students in the four IDCE programs learn to grapple with complexity, to analyze problems, and to envision real solutions from various disciplinary perspectives, which take into account the priorities of different groups.

Financial Aid and Funding Resources

The cost of private education continues to rise, and Clark University is no exception. However, as part of our mission, IDCE remains committed to an economically and internationally diverse study body.

To support this effort, IDCE provides some form of financial assistance to more than 80% of its M.A. students in the form of merit based partial tuition awards, which range from 35-100% of the total cost. Many IDCE students also take advantage of opportunities for work-study, teaching, and research assistantships.

Because of these resources, we actively encourage all qualified applicants—international as well as domestic—to consider IDCE, regardless of whether they can afford the full cost of attending. If admitted, applicants will receive an offer outlining what kinds of financial assistance they are eligible to receive.

We also strongly urge prospective students seek out additional, independent sources of financing to help cover the cost of graduate study. Extensive need-based grants and loans are available to U.S. Citizen or Permanent Resident students through U.S. federal resources. Students who wish to apply for need-based assistance must submit the FAFSA (Financial Application for Federal Student Aid) by March 1. For information regarding need-based financial aid and application procedures, visit FAFSA. A significant number of funding sources are also available for international students as well.

Visit Funding Assistance for more information.