What Do You Learn in Cannabis School?
Cannabis education is on the rise in New York after weed was legalized in 2021. Why do students enroll and what do they learn?
A woman walks past the library at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn.
Donald Harrison Jr., 30, always said he would get a bachelor’s degree, but not until he was certain about what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. After working as a lifeguard, a medical courier and as a security guard, he found his answer at the local cannabis shop.
“I already smoked a lot of weed and I was tired of buying it, so I wanted to learn how to grow it.” The shop clerk couldn’t answer his detailed questions, and referred him to a student at Medgar Evers (MEC), a college in Crown Heights, which had just started offering a program in cannabis science.
Harrison decided to enroll but held off telling his mom about it. “When I finally told her I was going back to school… and that I enrolled in a bachelor’s of environmental science with a minor in Cannabis, she looked at me in disbelief and said ‘Excuse me?!’”
His mom eventually came around to the idea, in part because she was suffering from knee pain and got relief from a cannabis-based salve her son’s classmate concocted. “That solidified her belief. She experienced it herself.” Harrison finished his cannabis minor last year and is now working on an environmental science major.
Smoking pot isn’t a prerequisite, as proven by finance graduate and last year’s school valedictorian, Sherifa Clarke, who also took some cannabis courses. “I’m Jamaican, we all know what that means regarding weed. But I’m not a huge partaker of the plant. I have asthma, so with my medication, I never really get high from smoking weed.”
Instead, her interest came from a social justice point of view: “As someone who saw friends who sold get locked up, studying cannabis and learning about the history and the fight surrounding it felt like a full-circle moment.”
This history was not lost on the designers of the program at historically black Medgar Evers College, founded in 1970 and named after civil rights icon Medgar Wiley Evers. Program coordinator Dr. Alicia Reid said at the time that the program would “elevate a community that has been sidelined, blocked out, stifled and alienated, and even forgotten because of the war on drugs and associated cannabis policies.”
The program offers tracks on testing, cultivation, business and health. Students can take courses ranging from “Environmentally Sustainable Cannabis Growing” to “Dispensary Standard Operating Procedures.”
Alana Hans-Cohen teaches the dispensary course. She says she shows students “how to avoid getting fined or having their license revoked,” along with standard procedures for product handling and storage.
The program is not the first nor the only cannabis degree in the country. In 2007, an unaccredited for-profit school called Oaksterdam University was founded in California, where medical cannabis has been legal since 1996. In 2017, Northern Michigan University was the first public university to offer a four-year degree in Medicinal Plant Chemistry.
Last year, fashion business school LIM College, located in Midtown Manhattan, started offering degrees in the business of cannabis. The academic director, Micheal Zaytsev, is a former MEC professor. He considers LIM’s program the business counterpart to the more science-focused program at MEC.
“People often ask, ‘Why is a fashion college doing cannabis?,’” says Zaytsev. “There are actually so many overlaps. In ancient China they already made clothing out of hemp. It is actually more sustainable than cotton to grow. So we’re now trying to incorporate cannabis fashion into our program.”
Zaytsev says a degree would give students a leg up. “The cannabis market is highly regulated, the rules are constantly changing, and there is a robust illegal market to compete with. So specialized knowledge is critical. You don’t open a coffee shop if you don’t know how to make coffee. It’s the same with weed. If you don’t know anything about cannabis, it takes about six months to a year to be trained on the job.”
Although the rollout in New York has been slow, the job prospects on the longer term seem promising.By 2025, cannabis is expected to create 63,000 jobs in New York, according to CannabizTeam, an executive search and staffing company. Salaries range for full-timers in the Cannabis Industry range from around $40,000 for plant trimmers to roughly $100,000 for dispensary managers.
Harrison is sure he wants to remain in the industry. While he is finishing his environmental science degree, he has a part-time job as a budtender, which is comparable to being a bartender. Instead of serving alcohol however, budtenders serve cannabis products and give recommendations.
He’s also working to launch a smoking device with a built in ash chamber, which makes it easier for sick people to use cannabis. He hopes to inspire the kids in Jamaica, Queens, where he is from: “I come from a poor community where not everybody has the chance to become an entrepreneur, but I want to show them that you can go further than you could have ever imagined.”
