Colleges formalize cannabis education programs

While Dr. John Frost was working as an adjunct chemistry professor at the Community College of Denver in early 2020, his dean approached faculty members and “asked if anybody knew anything about cannabis,” he recalls.

The cannabis industry in Colorado at the time was  in its infancy, with few opportunities for formal training and education for people interested in building a career. Frost, a chemist, happened to be familiar [with—?] from his time working for a lab equipment manufacturer, when he consulted industry partners on the “science side” of cannabis.

Frost ultimately volunteered his knowledge and is now faculty chair and director of CCD’s cannabis business degree program and its cannabis science and operations degree program. 

The way Frost was thrust into cannabis isn’t dissimilar from others in the industry. Marijuana businesses have relied on employees formally trained in other fields, like chemistry or agriculture, with skills that could be applied to cannabis cultivation, manufacturing and sales. Others are “self-taught” or learn technical skills on the job, he said.

But as the industry matures, demand for professionals educated specifically in cannabis is growing and will continue to, as more states legalize recreational and medical use and sales across the country, Frost said. Colorado colleges and universities have started to recognize this and fill the gap.

“A big part of what the industry has been asking for is more dedication, professionalism, reliability and background knowledge” from employees, Frost said. “There’s tons of valuable experiences to be had and growth opportunities, just working your way up. But it takes a long time and the industry is growing very rapidly.

“There’s need now,” he added.

NEW DEGREES

CCD programs that launched last year include an associate of applied science degree in cannabis business and bachelor of applied science degree in cannabis science and operations.

The University of Denver also rolled out a partnership in March with Green Flower, an cannabis education technology company, to offer three new six-week online certificates in cannabis-related fields through the university’s Center for Professional Development.

The DU and CCD programs are tailored to fill the more than 428,000 jobs nationwide in the cannabis industry, according to Frost and DU’s University College leadership, where the certificates and other continuing education programs are housed.

The cannabis job numbers were reported by Leafly, a legal marijuana retailer site which tracks employment in the industry, since the U.S. Department of Labor does not, due to federal prohibition. Colorado had the second-largest cannabis job market in the nation as of January with 38,337 positions, up from 35,539 in 2021, according to Leafly’s jobs reports from 2021 and 2022.

The expanding job market and decreasing stigma around cannabis careers have excited students to sign up for formal education programs and learn about the industry, said Daniel Kalef, Green Flower’s vice president of higher education.

DU is one of 18 colleges and universities nationwide to offer the company’s non-credit certificate programs in three to four areas of the cannabis industry — business, health care and medicine, and agriculture and horticulture, Kalef said. Some of Green Flower’s postsecondary partners also offer a law and policy certificate, which DU is considering developing on its own with help from cannabis law experts in the university’s law school, said Michael McGuire, dean of DU’s University College.

Kalef views the Green Flower partnerships with accredited institutions as a way to further legitimize the industry, putting trustworthy names to a career path sometimes looked down upon. 

“We talked to a lot of consumers and the market research showed us that for the vast majority of people that were in the business or wanting to be in the business, they already had college experience or college credit or a degree,” Kalef said. “They needed something very specific to the industry.”

There’s a lack of knowledge around how to start a cannabis business or the specific rules that must be followed, since it’s a heavily regulated industry, he said. 

Prospective business owners “didn’t know what compliance was like, or licensing, or the fact that they couldn’t buy a Google AdWord with the word ‘cannabis’ in it, or what an HR plan should look like,” Kalef added. 

Green Flower will also launch a fifth certificate track, in compliance and risk, this November, to address the “huge demand for compliance officers within the cannabis industry,” he said. 

BREAKING BARRIERS TO THE LAB

CCD, for its part, formed its associate and bachelor degrees and curriculum with input from some 86 business partners, who completed surveys and brainstorming sessions, Frost said. 

The two degrees cover the unique aspects of the cannabis business market, like regulatory requirements and the evolving public health research around marijuana use and misuse, he said.

Bachelor students will get 400 hours of hands-on instruction in a new campus lab, where they will learn how to test marijuana and hemp for compliance with Colorado law, using industry-level equipment, he said.

“They have a final course that I teach — their capstone analysis course — where they’re given some samples and told to give us the full regulatory compliance analysis,” Frost added. “Are they safe for human consumption? Do they pass the regulatory tests?”

The chemistry- and microbiology-focused courses are structured to remove “obstacles and barriers” that sometimes keep interested students out of STEM fields, he said. For example, for medical students, organic chemistry is seen as a “filter course” to weed out under-performing students. 

But “there’s a lot in organic chemistry that is not particularly relevant to what the industry does on a day-to-day basis,” Frost said.

“What we’ve done is taken the important bits, as they apply to cannabis and hemp, and we’ve pulled those out from organic chemistry, from analytical chemistry and from microbiology,” he said. “We formed them into one course, where we teach those principles with an eye towards cannabis.”

The biology and chemistry classes in the program are still “pretty challenging,” said Natacha Dana, a CCD student who’s dual-enrolled in the associate and bachelor cannabis degree programs. Dana, 41, was a budtender and assistant manager of a LivWell dispensary, and is now taking classes full-time — she’s interested in the public health considerations and medicinal uses for cannabis.

“You think about it when you smoke cannabis or ingest it, and the way it affects your body,” she told the Business Journal. “That’s why I want to go into the science field, so I can understand how cannabis alters the mind or heals, or helps people prevent seizures. Why does it eat at the cancer?

“There’s just so many reasons — I want to know why,” she added. “I’m so curious.”

INDUSTRY PROSPECTS

Frost is confident that students who graduate with the CCD degrees will be placed quickly in industry positions, as is Dana. 

Both degree programs include an internship with the college’s cannabis industry partners during the last semester — the first students will intern during January 2023 — but some are already interning unofficially this summer, because of high demand from employers, Frost said. Some businesses are funding the remainder of their interns’ tuition for the program, he added.

“I have had industry partners banging at my door, saying, ‘When do we get the interns?’” Frost said. “There’s such an excitement from the industry that not only are they banging down my door to try to get access to our students as early as possible, but they’re showing a real commitment to the process as well, and are willing to invest in these students’ education.”

The Marijuana Industry Group, a trade association for regulated marijuana businesses in Colorado, would like to get more involved in this graduate-to-cannabis business pipeline as well, said Truman Bradley, executive director of MIG.

“There’s much more of a focus on advanced degrees now than there was before,” Bradley told the Business Journal. “That’s not to say that you can’t get in and be successful without an advanced degree — you certainly can. But it’s a lot more data-heavy now. The compliance aspect of it is huge, and the penalties for non-compliance are really severe. So that’s why that field is so important.”

But he also warned that the cannabis market is tightening. For the first time since legalization, marijuana sales in the state are declining this year, according to Bradley. 

The sales boom that retailers experienced during 2020 due to the COVID pandemic tapered off in late 2021 and the decline has continued through 2022, he said. Combined sales of recreational and medical marijuana in the state are down more than 20 percent year over year, MIG reported.

“That’s really going to hurt the businesses and the folks coming out of these [cannabis education] programs who want to get hired,” he said, noting that some companies are laying off workers for the first time.

At the same time, graduates of cannabis degree or certificate programs could be better poised to fill roles in the constrained job market, Bradley said. 

Companies “need to be more efficient with their workforce, unfortunately, as margins are cut,” he said. “Being versatile and being able to do a few different things is really important right now.”