Supporting thriving water futures through education and career pathways: perspectives from Hawai‘i educators

Executive Summary

This report seeks to identify and map existing University of Hawai‘i (UH) System assets (strengths, capabilities, and expertise), as well as programmatic gaps and potential synergies within workforce development programs. Our aim is to enhance existing and shape future UH-based wai (freshwater) educational and career pathways. Findings draw on interviews with university faculty, alumni, and non-instructional program coordinators and directors. This research is a multi-department collaboration including the UH Mānoa Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawai‘i Economic Research Organization (UHERO), Institute for Sustainability and Resilience (ISR), University of Hawai‘i Sea Grant College Program (Hawai‘i Sea Grant), and Water Resources Research Center (WRRC). Funding for this work comes from the Hawaiian Islands Environmental Finance Center of the Hawai‘i Community Foundation.

The objectives of this report are to:

• Identify the range of training opportunities available to Hawai‘i students that relate to current and future water stewardship;
• Identify key features of sustained and successful models of Hawai‘i-based education and career pathway programs;
• Understand how existing strengths, capabilities, and expertise within the UH System can contribute to enhanced water-related education and career pathways.

We interviewed 38 individuals representing University of Hawai‘i faculty, alumni, and program directors and coordinators. Program directors and coordinators were affiliated with long-standing Hawai‘i STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) focused, environmental, and experiential learning programs. Interview questions focused on four main themes:

• Professional journeys (asked of all interviewees): individual reflections on interviewee journeys to their current position.
• UH water-related degree programs (asked of faculty and alumni): program background and structure, core elements of the program enabling student success (courses and complementary non-instructional programming), strengths, areas for program improvement, program effectiveness, post-graduate trajectories.
• Elements of sustained and successful pathways programs (asked of program coordinators/directors): program origins, typical participant profiles, metrics of success, program effectiveness in terms of recruitment, retention, and participant trajectory. Interviewees were explicitly asked to reflect on lessons learned and best practices they would recommend for a hypothetical new program focused on developing wai pathways.
• Interactions with the Hawai‘i wai matters/water sector (asked of faculty, coordinators/directors): collaborations, partnerships, or other projects with the Hawai‘i water sector.

Key insights from these interviews include:

• Interviewee career pathways were often shaped by connections to family and place (especially for ‘ōiwi and kama‘āina interviewees), mentors (inside and outside of academia), and funding availability.
• There are many water-related courses on the books already offered by UH Mānoa and many faculty with water relevant expertise. These tend to be scattered across different departments because of the broad multi-disciplinary nature of water stewardship.
• Overall, interviewees felt that despite strong wai course offerings across the UH Mānoa campus, there was a lack of coordination or visibility of water courses and a need for clearer connections between curriculum and employment opportunities.
• Despite the absence of a singular wai degree pathway, several existing programs offer freshwater credentialing options. Faculty and program coordinators help students navigate their academic journeys and find relevant wai courses and mentors using informal referral networks built on pre-existing relationships.
• Interviewees discussed a variety of ideas for credit and non-credit wai education options including certificates, a water focused master’s degree, non-credit training, and a Wai 100 course.
• The UH System has strong research infrastructure and existing mechanisms for student research. However, faculty and alumni expressed support for more experiential learning opportunities and curriculum incorporating place- and culture-based learning.
• Faculty and staff understanding of and connection to water sector employers plays a key role in student access to career pathways.
• Personnel from long-standing education and career pathway programs emphasized a few key aspects of their programming approaches:
  • Programs are adaptive, allowing space and time for iterative growth of the program and the individuals involved in the program. They are also strategic and intentional in their evolution keeping focus on core motivations and values.
  • Programs emphasize nurturing the “gifts” of participants rather than attempting to identify and fill gaps in skills or knowledge.
  • Relationships are central and developing trust across staff and program participants is important for an impactful program. Successful programs offered intensive mentoring relationships requiring significant staff time and resources.
  • Most of the programs interviewed compensated participants for their involvement in professional development experiences including via paid internships and fellowships. Many programs also provided more comprehensive support beyond salary such as housing, food, childcare, and transportation. 
  • Programs also provide administrative services for hosting organizations, such as recruiting, managing the application process, interviewing and selecting candidates, hiring, and paying mentees. Some programs go beyond alleviating administrative burdens and work to enhance the capacity of the host or mentor organization itself.
• These programs consider the long-term trajectory of their participants as their primary indicator of success. They want to see program participants secure employment or pursue a degree in a particular field. Many of the programs also think about the personal growth and quality of relationships that participants form as key measures of success.
• Silos in UH curricula and conceptualizations of wai may be limiting Hawai‘i’s progress in developing effective water management. Leadership to support coordination and systems alignments is needed.

Expanded key insights can be found in the conclusion of this report.

1. Introduction

Developing career and educational pathways is fundamental to supporting a thriving water future for Hawai‘i. These pathways include formal degrees and curriculum offered at the University of Hawai‘i (UH) and other educational institutions as well as internship and other professional pathway opportunities. Water stewardship is inherently interdisciplinary and applied, drawing from diverse fields including hydrology, engineering, ecology, public health, political science, economics, law, and planning (Camkin & Neto 2013). Water management also necessitates navigating divergent worldviews and values and complex histories (Beamer 2025). There is much that can be learned from both from experiences within existing disciplinary and cross-disciplinary degree programs within the University of Hawai‘i system and the successes of professional pathways programs providing experiential learning and mentorship to trainees.

This report is part of a broader project supporting wai educational and professional pathways in Hawai‘i funded by the Hawaiian Islands Environmental Finance Center of the Hawai‘i Community Foundation.

The objectives of the overall project are to:

1. Understand the staffing needs and barriers faced by the water sector, particularly as they relate to the training desired from UH programming.
2. Identify the skills and capacity needed for thriving water stewardship now and into the future.
3. Identify the range of training opportunities available to Hawai‘i students that relate to current and future water stewardship.
4. Identify key features of sustained and successful models of Hawai‘i-based education and career pathway programs.
5. Understand how existing strengths, capabilities, and expertise within the UH System can contribute to enhanced water-related education and career pathways.

A companion report, Supporting thriving water futures through education and career pathways: perspectives from the Hawai‘i water sector, focused on objectives one and two and draws on findings from interviews with water sector representatives from federal, state, and county agencies as well as private and civil society representatives. 

This report focuses on objectives three to five, tapping into Hawai‘i educator perspectives including results from interviews with university faculty (primarily at UH Mānoa), recent UH Mānoa alumni, and coordinators or directors from non-instructional programs. Through these interviews, we identify and map existing UH system assets (strengths, capabilities, and expertise), as well as programmatic gaps and potential synergies within workforce development programs to enhance existing, and shape future, UH-based wai educational and career pathways. By “educational and career pathways,” we mean the combination of formal and informal educational programs that shape student trajectories. This includes coursework, degree, and certificate programs, wraparound student support programs, and mentoring programs, such as professional or peer, internship, and experiential learning beyond the classroom that allow for place-based, culture-based, community-based, or technical skills-focused trainee development.

Hawaiian Language

Hawaiian language terms are used throughout this report. Because the language is highly nuanced with multiple meanings and interpretations, terms are hyperlinked to Hawaiian language translation resources aggregated on the UH Hilo-hosted Wehewehe Wikiwiki (https://wehe.hilo.hawaii.edu/).

2. Methods

2.1 Interviewee Profiles

We carried out 37 semi-structured interviews with 38 key informants who we identified as offering valuable perspectives. Interviewees included:

UH Mānoa faculty spanning a broad set of departments that offer water-related courses, are known for training Hawai‘i professionals working in water, and/or support Hawai‘i water research. We included disciplines aligning with conventional definitions of water sector (hydrology, water resource management, water and wastewater engineering), but we were also deliberate in our inclusion of environmental sciences, social sciences including planning and economics, public health (environmental health), law, and Hawaiian Studies given both the cultural and historical context of Hawai‘i’s waters and the established status of water as a public trust (Haw. Const. art. XI, § 7; Haw. Rev. Stat. § 174C-2(a), 1987).

UH Mānoa alumni working on freshwater issues with local water organizations and agencies (Figure 1). We initially focused on recent graduates within 10 years of degree completion whose reflections on their educational journeys we thought would be most relevant for current programming.

Coordinators and directors of non-instructional programs from long-standing Hawai‘i internship and pre-professional programs hosted both within and outside of the UH System. Many of these were experiential learning programs in the environmental and natural resources and conservation sector serving a range of participants from high school students/GED to college undergraduates to working professionals. While many programs were not explicitly freshwater-focused, these were selected as valuable models to learn from, given their popularity with Hawai‘i students and large community of past participants enabled by successive cohorts and sustained (multi-decadal) program support. Our aim was to draw insights from these to inform the design of more broadly impactful and financially sustainable freshwater-specific professional programs. 

As our interviews proceeded, we learned that many interviewees we approached for a specific perspective in fact wore multiple hats and identities. Several faculty served in leadership roles for professional development programs, and some program personnel and faculty were also UH alumni. Our three initial groups are thus depicted spanning multiple interviewee categories (see Figure 1).      

2.2 Interview Structure and Themes                   

Semi-structured interviews were tailored to the interviewee types. Faculty and alumni interviewees were asked about their perspectives on degree programs and career development in water-related disciplines. We looked to program directors and coordinators for lessons learned on building and sustaining Hawai‘i education and career pathways programs. Interviews with individuals with overlapping roles focused on themes drawn from multiple interview guides.

Interview questions focused on four main themes:

• Pathway to profession (all interviewees): individual reflections on their personal and professional journeys to their current careers.
• UH water-related degree programs (faculty and alumni): program background and structure, core elements of the program enabling student success (courses and complementary non-instructional programming), strengths, areas for program improvement, program effectiveness, post-graduate trajectories.
• Sustained and successful Hawai‘i pathways programs (program coordinators/directors): program origins, core elements, typical participant profiles, metrics of success, program effectiveness in terms of recruitment, retention, and participant trajectory. Interviewees were explicitly asked to reflect on lessons learned and best practices they would recommend for a hypothetical new program focused on developing wai pathways.
• Interactions with the Hawai‘i wai community/water sector (all interviewees): collaborations, partnerships, or other projects with the Hawai‘i water sector.

Interviews were carried out from June 2024 to May 2025 on Zoom (n=35) and in-person (n=2) and each ran roughly an hour. If participants agreed to being recorded, interviews were audio-recorded and interviews were transcribed and corrected using the Otter.ai transcription (https://otter.ai/) workspace. Following transcription, interviews were manually coded for defined and emergent themes; we also used MAXQDA software (https://www.maxqda.com/) for managing transcripts and collaborative coding. Interviewees were sent a draft report over email and were able to provide feedback over email or during a set of virtual workshops held in November 2025.

2.3 Study Limitations

There were significant disruptions to the federal funding landscape during the interview period which ended up limiting the availability of coordinators of programs affected by funding cuts. As a result, we were unable to connect with our full set of desired interviewees. Funding uncertainties also shaped interviewee responses. We acknowledge that our study is not comprehensive of all relevant pathways programs within the UH System or Hawaiian Islands and may have limited application in a future of reduced federal funding.

This study does not comprehensively coverall water-related training opportunities in the UH System as a whole. Faculty and alumni interviewees were primarily from UH Mānoa and represent an incomplete set of water-relevant disciplines and departments. For example, while we included planning, engineering, various earth and environmental sciences, Hawaiian studies and law, we overlooked fields such as atmospheric sciences, marine biology, ecology, chemistry, bioengineering, anthropology, public policy, and business. Despite these limitations, we expect the key insights from these interviews offer a useful foundation for innovating in Hawai‘i water education and career pathways.

3. Results

3.1 Pathways to Wai

To gain a better understanding of “successful” pathways, we asked interviewees to share their journey to their current positions. Many interviewees expressed an early interest in the environment and described supportive mentors and turning points that shaped their journeys. Faculty interviewees frequently noted an early interest in the environment. Several key components shaped faculty interviewee career trajectories including: influential mentors and early experiences, undergraduate degree selection, and availability of funded opportunities. While many UH Mānoa faculty and recent UH Mānoa alumni employed in water-related STEM fields described a relatively direct sequence of training steps into their current positions, other interviewees, particularly program coordinators and directors outside of UH, described their paths as non-linear and shaped by many other life experiences beyond academic training.

Early grounding in ‘āina, family, place, and environment 

Many interviewees spoke about the early connections to land and water informing their journeys, and this was particularly strong among interviewees raised in Hawai‘i. Hawaiian and kama‘āina (individuals from Hawai‘i) interviewees frequently shared a strong grounding in family and place, with their connection to water often rooted in a Hawaiian worldview. One program coordinator shared how their path was shaped by their family and community from an early age: “I feel like my path was already kind of there, whether I liked it or not, from the beginning, just growing up in the family that I grew up in… so I ended up being a part of these [‘āina stewardship] spaces from a very young age.” Early experiences in ‘āina stewardship also shaped later educational choices of both faculty and alumni raised in Hawai‘i, guiding choices of their undergraduate major or helping one person navigate when there was no obvious pathway. One faculty interviewee explained, “I found my way to wai more through lo‘i restoration, swimming in streams, thinking about the health of streams, just with my own ‘ohana and having those experiences earlier in life. I wanted to explore more when I reached the university, but there really wasn’t a clear pathway.”

Many kama‘āina pursuing college off- island made deliberate choices in an effort to “come back home.” In the words of one interviewee: “I always knew that I wanted to stay in Hawai‘i eventually, that was my goal. I wanted to leave for college for undergraduate… but I knew I wanted to come home, so I purposefully tried to focus on majors that would provide me with a job opportunity when I got home” Another interviewee shared: “I really love Hawai‘i, and I wanted to do environmental policy work here, and I feel like my pathway was all about figuring out how to do that.” For one student, a class in California provided motivation to learn more about wai back home: “A really big moment for me was in a water resource class, and we were learning about the history of water in California. It made me realize how lucky we are in Hawai‘i to still have our water, even though, as I continue to learn, that’s not always the case… It just made me think, I don’t know so much about my own home. It just sparked a reminder, like there’s some things you need to learn.”

Varied campus experiences

UH System alumni shared how their foundations in ‘āina were ignited, challenged, or nurtured in their respective courses and programs. One UH Mānoa alum shared the transformative influence of a service learning course: “When I went out with [professor], it was basically service learning trips. We would go out to a site. We went and met people [from the community], learned about the site, and then just took care of the site… And I think that activated my passion.”

Others described elements of their UH Mānoa experience as alienating, particularly for those within STEM degree programs. One program coordinator shared their thought process as a student when they were considering transferring into Hawaiian Studies because of the challenges they experienced in their STEM program: “The easy thing…would have been to go to Hawaiian Studies and be with all the people who understand me and who talk like me and probably love the things that I love to do, and understand them in a really deep and spiritual way, or I can stay here and… debate people about Monsanto and ag land use in Hawai‘i and all these things.”

Mentors matter

Mentoring relationships were important elements of most interviewees’ journeys. The mentor-mentee relationship played a central role in providing students access to educational opportunities. Access included encouraging, suggesting, networking, or connecting trainees to appropriate (often funded) opportunities based on the mentor’s knowledge of the student’s strengths and interests. As one faculty interviewee shared, “Mentors come from all different facets of your life, and they all help build you to where you are.”

One faculty member explained how early mentoring in high school shaped their entire career pathway:

 “Being a member of [an environmental science club], and [my teacher], definitely embedded within myself and other members a really strong sense of service to Hawai‘i’s environmental systems…The second really strong influence in high school was my participation in honors science research. My second kumu who really shaped my life… inspire[d] students to look at questions that really mattered to them in their own community, and then to learn how to think independently about how to solve those in a contemporary, scientific way.”

An absence of faculty mentors can also influence career paths. One interviewee explained how they ended up as a geotechnical engineer despite their primary interest in environmental engineering: “I wanted to do environmental (water) engineering but at the time there weren’t any professors doing that. They were all doing wastewater and I just wasn’t interested in wastewater. So I thought of hydraulics, to stay with the water, but … I ended up meeting my geotech professor…and he offered me a position to do a masters.”

Another faculty member shared how a mentor from the community shaped their nuanced understanding of the relationship across Hawaiian knowledge systems, science, and research:

“She was a really amazing mentor to show me those tide pool areas and how you interact with them and what you learn from them, and also the function of science, because she lived and observed a place over time, and the amount of ‘ike she had from that place was just astronomical. But she didn’t understand why I would want to do that as a study, or why I would want to get a PhD study in that place. She’s like, ‘Well, what’s the function of that?’ So I think from her, I really started understanding the difference between ‘ike and science and knowing and being a part and creating relationships to the place and how different that is from doing research about it.”

Trajectories were shaped by undergraduate major and funded opportunities

Many interviewees shared a common interest in the environment that informed their choice of undergraduate major. For STEM faculty in particular, the selection of an undergraduate major tended to be the start of a linear career trajectory described by a series of degrees. As one interviewee shared: “My whole background is about water and hydrology: my whole four years of undergrad… I was trained in agriculture engineering. So it starts with water, water resource management, irrigation systems, crop management, hydrology, hydraulics and engineering design. That’s my training.”

Faculty and alumni in water-related social science, interdisciplinary environmental and health fields, as well as program coordinators, described less linear pathways. In some cases, they pivoted entirely in their disciplinary focus along the way. In the words of one program coordinator, “For me, I guess it’s like meandering pathways or jumping from one pathway to another. But I think, you know, it’s a good example of how you can take skills from different occupations and work experiences, and they become even more valuable in different contexts.”

Funded opportunities were an important force shaping career pathways, enabling advanced training, or when not available, leading to off campus employment. Recent UH Mānoa alumni noted the necessity of seeking additional income during their educational endeavors given Hawai‘i’s high cost of living. One alum discussed how balancing school and work was difficult but also broadened their experiences and networks in a way that was ultimately beneficial to their career.

3.2 UH Mānoa Water-Related Instructional Pathways

UH Mānoa alumni and faculty, including those serving as program directors and coordinators offered reflections and ideas on UH System degrees, certificates, credentialing, and coursework. Across the board, faculty and alumni alike indicated a need for better awareness and coordination of existing courses. Many also expressed a need for increased faculty understanding of job opportunities and requirements of the professional realm to align degree and training pathways better. UH Mānoa faculty who worked with students in instructional or research settings tended to have more detailed knowledge of graduate student career trajectories, whereas UH System interviewees involved in career pathways and mentoring programs were most knowledgeable about undergraduate student experiences and trajectories (see Section 3.3).

Existing degree programs and coursework at UH Mānoa

UH Mānoa faculty and alumni interviewees shared their knowledge of existing course offerings, identifying existing core courses and describing cross-listing and referrals that strengthened inter-departmental connections. As one senior faculty noted:

“There are a lot of good courses and good teachers on the faculty in UH, and they’re in a variety of different departments, because water resources is such a multi-disciplinary area of study. They’re in geography, NREM, atmospheric science, civil engineering, earth sciences… It has varied as people have come and gone, but it’s been that way since I was a student here. So that is the strength—there are good people and good courses available.”

Table 1 summarizes findings from UH Mānoa degree programs and departments covered in this study, highlighting wai-related offerings (credentials, courses, research opportunities), existing strengths, and interviewee-suggested opportunities to address programmatic gaps.

Despite the absence of a singular wai degree, several existing degree programs offer UH Mānoa undergraduates freshwater-related pathways and options (see Table 1). These include bachelor of science degree pathways: Earth Sciences BS-Environment and Hydrology track (established 2023) and Global Environmental Sciences (GES) BS tracks in Environmental Health Sciences, Environmental Planning, or Sustainability Science. Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering (CECE) and Natural Resources and Environmental Management (NREM) also offer undergraduate BS degrees and freshwater-relevant coursework but do not have clearly identified freshwater-focused programs. The same can be said ofbachelor of artsdegree pathways with the Hawaiian Studies BA-Mālama ‘Āina track, Geography and Environment BA-Physical Geography track, and the Interdisciplinary Studies – Sustainability BA. Among the BA degrees, only the Sustainability BA-Food Energy Water track includes “water” in its title. Although these programs are not explicitly freshwater focused, faculty and alumni interviewees commenting on the Sustainability degree/certificate indicated it would be relatively easy to design a multidisciplinary water-focused track into the existing Sustainability framework because of the way degrees are built upon on cross-listed courses.

UH Mānoa graduate degrees and certificates include an NREM coursework-based master’s (MEM) Land and Water Resource Management track, GES bachelor’s to master’s (BAM) pathways with Public Health (MPH) and Planning (MURP). The relatively new Hawaiian Studies Kū‘oko‘a ‘Āina-Based Leadership graduate certificate also promotes courses and student/faculty exchange across multiple departments.

Table 1. UH Mānoa faculty and alumni interviews highlighted wai-related tracks and courses within existing degree programs. These are organized broadly below by degree type offered (STEM, social sciences, professional, none) and administrative unit (college or school)A single asterisk (*) indicates professional/terminal degrees, and a double asterisk (**) indicates programs not represented in this study by interviewees but identified during analysis as offering potentially-relevant coursework and training opportunities.

Interviewees also shared suggestions for addressing curricular gaps through development of new courses, or hiring additional faculty:

• Water planning in Hawai‘i. As one alumna noted,
  • “Having a whole [planning] course dedicated to the topic of water would be low hanging fruit. Maybe that could be done in coordination or collaboration with the law school, because the law school does water law training, which is [foundational] for the work [that planners] do. Planning, even though it’s a cornerstone of the [Hawai‘i] Water Code… is not used to the extent that it should or could be…There’s coursework through the law school that you can do to focus on water, but the planning side of it is pretty absent.”
• Holistic water economics. A faculty member explained,
  • “Water is a whole sector for economists. They look at the market and non-market values of water, and apply economic concepts to water specifically. It’s pretty niche, but so important [to attend to] those interlinkages between water quality and quantity and policy frameworks… We need to account for the economics of water, but also the social values of water, and the justice and equity aspects.”
• Water conservation/ agricultural water resource management. Formerly taught in the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources by a faculty member who has since retired.
• Environmental health. Course offerings are currently limited by the availability of faculty to teach coursework in this focus area within public health.
• A “Wai 100” class. This idea was brought up at the Phase 1 (employer-side) workshop and reiterated by an alum interviewee. The proposal is an introductory survey course that would touch on multiple dimensions of freshwater with a place-based approach and examples. A 100- or 200-level course could be offered, not just at Mānoa, but also at any UH System campus for broader reach, since community colleges cannot offer 300-level courses.

Faculty were familiar with their own department’s course offerings and faculty expertise, but only a few expressed awareness of courses in other departments. At a follow-up workshop, interviewees emphasized that existing courses could be better organized and advertised at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The imperative for better coordination was captured by a graduate student alumna’s reflection:

“It was hard for me to find my footing in the UH water space. What does the UH water space look like, because it’s variable, right? There’s the stream people…and then there’s the geography side of things, or very specific to just hydrology, and not even necessarily biology….it’s everywhere and nowhere at once. I felt like [I was] scrambling to find classes that I found interesting and that would fit into the skills and background that I should have and need… I was landing [in the NREM] water specialization, but there’s policy, terrestrial ecosystems, and GIS. I got to take a water class in the Hawaiian Studies Department. I took my law, my policy class… which was super fun, and then I just ran out of time, and I couldn’t really take more classes that would have fit what I wanted to take or needed.”

A senior faculty member echoed the former student’s comment, noting that the challenges of coordinating water resources coursework are not unique to UH Mānoa. “The weakness is [UH Mānoa water resources course offerings] have never been coordinated in any way, so that’s always been a drawback. It’s not unusual. [Water resources] tends to be diffuse and not well-defined within American universities. And that is a problem.”

A mid-career faculty member affirmed the need for clearer wai pathways in light of student experience:

“I always think about these educational pipelines and these pathways and ‘auwai, right? There’s no actual flow. If a student came in and was like, ‘I want to do wai,’ there’s no obvious direction for them to go, where they come out and [know] yep, this big job [is waiting]… I think we have some of the pieces right…[but] I think for water stewardship, if we want to actually create kia‘i for wai, having a pathway beyond Mālama ‘Āina^[1] in Hawaiian Studies would be really powerful.”

The same interviewee suggested some easy first steps might be organizing existing classes and complementary research opportunities:

“I think there’s a lot of classes that already exist that could be … pushed together or just organized in a way that could be very accessible to a student’s pathway or pipeline, in order to [help them] think about [themselves] as a water scientist, water researcher, or water protector…and then also the different opportunities to do research in different ways on campus. We have the pieces, but we haven’t put them together well enough to actually support the next generation of strong water-minded people that are aware of all the different layers associated with water on an island.”

Faculty and program coordinators also help students navigate their academic journeys through informal referral networks built on pre-existing relationships. For example, faculty in NREM and Earth Sciences regularly refer their trainees to colleagues’ courses in surface hydrology and groundwater outside of their home departments. Similarly, Hawai‘inuiākea faculty interviewees steer students to colleagues with specific technical and practice-based strengths and resources, illustrating how they map expertise and guide students to training opportunities outside of formal credentialing pathways. This implies that enhanced faculty awareness of each other, especially across departments, colleges, and campuses, could strengthen informal referral networks to help students navigate opportunities in freshwater-related studies. Beyond individual student benefits, enhanced faculty awareness of on-campus assets (colleagues, courses, programs) is a step toward collective approaches for co-designing cohesive water pathways.

As one faculty interviewee noted, formalizing partnerships could scale up benefits to students:

“Something that we’re lacking right now is formalized partnerships, relationships. [My colleague] has been here a long time and has built these [personal] professional networks, but as far as our department [students and faculty] being able to point to… the person to go to for [a particular specialty] it’s something we lack right now… There’s so much happening that it’s hard to pin down who’s where, who’s doing what at any given moment. We could be better in terms of integrating, involving ourselves in this larger network.”

There was strong consensus among interviewees about the need for more coordination across different departments and programs within UH Mānoa and the UH System as a whole. Throughout our entire set of interviews, key leaders in both student development programming and instruction were named as champions of change. But interviewees clarified the need for dedicated leadership to enable truly navigable pathways for students wanting to work in wai:

“I don’t think there’s been dedicated leadership to thinking through how to make this easier and better. You know, UH plays a pivotal role when students can navigate it. But it hasn’t been a strategic priority to make that shift easier. We’ve done some stuff that has been pretty significant. But again, they’re all one individual champion in a different part of university trying to make a difference.”

Cross-campus coordination: credentialing and non-credit initiatives

Faculty and alumni repeatedly commented on the complex multi-disciplinary nature of water and environment and societal issues. Beyond the earlier discussion of new courses or retrofitting existing courses, coordination suggestions varied. The topic of “certificates” came up multiple times. One senior faculty suggested:

“At a minimum… what should get done would be to develop at least a certificate program. Maybe starting at the undergraduate level, and then maybe a graduate certificate program, and maybe a degree program at some point, because [freshwater] is so important to Hawai‘i. It would help to focus people’s efforts around the campus to better coordinate and fill the gaps, to provide comprehensive training for people that want to work in the field.”

Cross-departmental multidisciplinary certificates like the 16-credit graduate Kū‘oko‘a certificate already exist (e.g. Table 1) but were established relatively recently, and their effectiveness at stimulating coordination and strengthened pathways has yet to be determined. On the other hand, the UH System-wide Marine Option Program certificate has been in existence for 50 years. However, nuances around certificates abound. One UH Mānoa faculty member shared their perspective on the challenges associated with graduate certificates:

“[Graduate certificates] suffer from low enrollment. They seem like they should… complement your primary field of study. But then students are already stressed out about their master’s, so then they don’t add the certificate, and then the certificate always has low enrollment, and you’re constantly justifying why it should live, and the university is constantly trying to kill it.”

A former student working in water described how they felt a technically-focused hydrology certificate could provide students a smoother pathway to water sector employment:

“Everybody that works with me… we want more students from UH, that’s a no brainer. But it’s very difficult to get them into the hiring process and then realize they don’t have this class that they need. They don’t have the right chemistry, or the right bio. That happens so frequently where we’ll have a great candidate who just doesn’t have that [required coursework]… Our dream of how to collaborate with the university would be to create a hydrology certificate. They’ve talked about the WRRC hosting, being the ones who manage the certificate, and then have other departments where the students would be required to take a hydrology course and a climate change course. As part of the certificate, they would also [take] the classes that they need… the physics and the calculus. It is hard to actually get students to sign up for that course; they’d have to be someone who really, really wanted to do it. But if we had a few of those students, it would be really helpful… If they could offer a certificate… where students can take the required classes in the math department, the chemistry department, and then have hydrology…they would be more employable in water…”

Interviewees also contemplated a water-focused master’s degree. The Department of Earth Science’s experiment with the one-year professional masters ended due to low enrollment. A faculty interviewee reflected that a more collaborative multi-department approach might maintain better enrollment:

“Perhaps [this kind of effort is] not just on the shoulders of one program, one department, but some kind of combined effort… through WRRC… would [work]. Because [participants were] professionals, and it was one year, and they did spend the summer, after [taking] classes and so forth, doing the internship, and they were done and had hands-on experience. Maybe that’s a fast and productive path in some areas.”

Another alumni interviewee suggested a similar partnership approach for a multidisciplinary master’s degree, but noted the challenge of ensuring that such a program is also cohesive:

“I think that [Sustainability] could potentially be a way to have a very diverse view of what water is- not just from an engineering perspective- which could be useful… I don’t know if there are partnerships for water oriented master’s programs or stuff like that. I certainly think that water is so important and it’s the heart of everything, but it also makes it very complicated, because it touches so many things, and so it’s sometimes quite difficult to have a cohesive program that is also useful.”

Finally, several interviewees both within and outside of the UH System highlighted the increased flexibility of non-credit trainings that could be developed in response to continually-evolving employer needs. As one program director shared:

“You know, it takes years for a degree program to be established. It takes a year or two even to develop a new course in the credit program system. We have seen that non-credit trainings are a really nimble, efficient way to get industry input, and we can stand up a non-credit course in a matter of months.”

Experiential Learning at UH Mānoa

Interviewees were enthusiastic about expanding opportunities for experiential learning, whether in classroom settings, independent research, or internships. They offered various interpretations of relevant and valuable experiential learning, and mechanisms to support it.

UH Mānoa faculty and alumni noted the university’s strong research infrastructure, breadth and depth of faculty expertise, and existing mechanisms for student research including graduate research assistantships (GRAs), undergraduate research opportunities (UROP) and summer research experiences for undergraduates (REU or URE). As one faculty interviewee in a research unit shared:

“We can and have provide[d] opportunities for graduate students and undergraduates to work on research projects and be paid… That’s super important to serious students, even if they’re not going to have a career in research. They get so much more out of their experience at a university if they end up working on a research project.”

When asked about their former students’ career trajectories, UH Mānoa faculty interviewees mostly described their graduate students, potentially due to the more intensive research mentoring context for graduate students compared to the instructional settings that dominate faculty-undergraduate interactions. Although funded research opportunities at UH Mānoa largely target graduate students (graduate assistants work at 0.5 FTE and are granted a tuition waiver), undergraduates can access extracurricular mentored research opportunities via the UH Mānoa campus-wide Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), cohort-based summer research experiences for undergraduates run by different colleges within the university (e.g. Project JESSE and NHSEMP in Engineering, Pacific Biosciences Research Center summer REU), and individual opportunities advertised and managed through the UH System-wide Student Employment and Cooperative Education system (SECE, hourly pay). Different degree programs also encourage undergraduate research through independent research courses, capstone courses, and undergraduate thesis requirements.

UH Mānoa faculty interviewees stressed the value of research for broadening and deepening student experiential learning, but some alumni felt their departmental programs’ heavy emphasis on research left them unaware of or under-prepared for non-academic career opportunities. One interviewee working for an NGO shared: “[My undergraduate program was] very research-focused. They are setting you up to go to grad school, telling you, ‘You can’t do anything with a bachelor’s….You have to have a master’s or a PhD’.” A graduate student alum from a different department shared a similar frustration about the narrow scope of career opportunities presented to them:

“In grad school, I felt like everything was about becoming a professor. That’s not your only option. I wish there were more opportunities to learn about what other people did… It would be nice if there were more internships or if [non-academics] were invited to give more lectures or presentations at UH …[so we could learn] ‘this is another job opportunity that I could do’ and even just to meet people, make that networking connection.”

Although most undergraduate research at UH Mānoa emphasizes faculty-led research, several interviewees noted that students valued research experiences that involved community partners or stakeholders. They suggested broadening the types of available undergraduate research opportunities and adding more hands-on mentoring to help students develop their own ideas into successfully-funded UROP proposals. One faculty member also noted critical challenges in implementing more community-engaged research:

“It’s tricky in that I have certain questions in my mind that I’m curious about, and I know I have the tools for some of them. The communities I’m working with… have different questions, and oftentimes we have to find a compromise. Do I even have the tools to help?…They [community] have such cool questions, but there’s no way anyone… would easily answer them. It has to be a long-term process. And many questions in Hawai‘i are like that, just because we don’t know much about the aquifer.”

They also shared insights on setting realistic expectations for such research.

“My interfacing with communities, in an ideal space, is that they have questions, we sit down and brainstorm over them, like what aspect of that can we answer with the tools we have? I [have] learned to be really honest in [communicating that] there’s no way our project can answer this or that question, which oftentimes is disappointing for them.”

An ‘ōiwi faculty member shared about their ongoing efforts to bring multiple ways of knowing wai into their research and teaching:

“We know a lot about wai from an ancestral perspective…there’s a lot of ‘ike out there where we all should start from… I think one of the layers that we could work on is training our faculty that are participating in this [summer REU] program, how to do community grounded research, or how to connect them with people that can show that perspective to the students.”

Alumni shared that in-class exposure to water and land issues awakened and deepened their understanding of complex interconnections of water, environment, and culture. As one former undergraduate (‘ōiwi and raised in the islands) explained:

“My water law class was probably the most impactful, but also environmental law and Native Hawaiian rights law were very impactful too, because they are, to me, equal parts of a recipe … We basically have no culture if we don’t have the elements in the natural resources that the foundation of the culture is built on. I think that recognizing that those topics really go hand in hand… That would be my advice for creating future water stewards or helping to build a vocational or educational training program for people who are going to do this work. I think it’s really essential to understand the cultural implications of the work that they do.”

Several alumni who were not raised in Hawai‘i shared a desire for more Hawai‘i-specific training in graduate coursework. One suggested: “I think absolutely more [works by Hawaiian scholars] should be incorporated. Important to learning and making the decision to stay in Hawai‘i is knowing what’s going on, knowing the history, knowing the political and social landscape.” Another alum indicated that context-specific understanding could be easily integrated into existing practice-oriented classes through case studies: “I think there are opportunities to build into the syllabus of each class a case study on a particular plan in Hawai‘i. We have all these plans that get written, including the Hawai‘i water plan, but most people don’t know what [these are] when they graduate” 

In addition to integrating Hawai‘i-specific cases into existing disciplinary training, interviewee responses pointed to development of a multi-disciplinary place- and problem-based survey course. A DURP alum now working in water noted, “The problems that we are dealing with in the world are not single-discipline problems. Even the most technical problem involves people at some level.” They went on to suggest developing “some kind of class that lets you see the breadth of what’s involved in environmental and fresh water management, like the different types of expertise that are involved in solving a problem.” As mentioned earlier, such a problem-based “Wai 100” course could draw on real-world Hawai‘i water cases including important cultural/historical contexts and engage multiple professionals and faculty.

Place-based curriculum development occurs across campus, but Hawai‘inuiākea faculty interviewees overwhelmingly emphasized Hawai‘i-specific cases and teaching within a Hawaiian cultural and historical context:

“We teach a lot of students from different departments, especially because of that Sustainability cross-listing, but also because the students are looking for that ‘ike, they’re looking at the broader, holistic idea, and they see that Hawai‘i has some of those answers… They want to immerse themselves. And so, you know, them taking the courses lets them put in the time to these places.”

A holistic, problem-based approach could potentially catalyze collaboration. As one faculty member reflected,“Water Resources is [still] very driven by more the natural science and technocratic engineering aspects of wai than its totality… We don’t have the institutional support for water justice in Hawai‘i…If there was something in a more holistic approach, that would be something we could all collectively collaborate on.”

Faculty Relationships and Knowledge of the Wai Sector are Critical

Across departments and units, faculty serve as important advisors steering students to career pathways. The strength of faculty understanding of the landscape of available jobs or relationships with employers shapes their effectiveness in this role. As one faculty member shared:

“Because I’m so connected with the Hawai‘i industry…I kind of have an idea of where to steer the students. But I think my peers, the other professors, they don’t have that connection with the industry, or even just the knowledge of what’s available…I think there’s reaching the students, but there’s also reaching the professors who are mandated to advise these students on what is available for the students and to value learning about the private industry or public industry here…like to really invest their time into learning more about [employers] so that [professors] can better serve their students.”

Faculty who have strong networks and experience outside of academia may be better equipped to connect students to experiences and opportunities that advance their professional development trajectories. Strengthening connections between graduate student research and water practitioners can also enable student access to non-academic mentoring and job opportunities. One faculty member working on regional water issues stressed the importance of non-academic mentors:

“[Regarding] having some sort of internship or link to mentors that are practical rather than academic, is there a way to link students more with personal mentors outside of academia? …Would they see [working with an agency] as a more attractive option? Are there co-sponsored PhD projects by the state in different water or land management [agencies]? I feel like that could be big. Just making that partnership institutional from the very beginning of a student’s graduate research journey, could be a really strong way to force that mentorship and application…”

In addition to facilitating connections, direct faculty guidance to students on navigating job searches and recruitment can be critically important. One faculty member highlighted how they mentored their students through the logistics and timing of job applications: “For the state government, the hiring process takes forever, right? I didn’t know this until later on. [Recently,] I actually pushed two [graduate] students to apply before they graduated. I say, ‘It’s going to take six months for you to get hired.’ So they applied in October to start in July.”

Beyond an individual faculty member’s network and mentoring, more formalized, or institutionalized, efforts enable placement of students in off-campus internships, externships, practica, and capstone projects. These formalized collaborations have the potential to be sustained by others beyond an initial faculty champion, and confer programmatic capacity and longevity. For example, co-curricular programs such as Maile Mentoring (at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology) and the Institute of Sustainability and Resilience (ISR) engage non-instructional faculty to help match undergraduate students to internships and externships and provide professional development training opportunities. Pathways programs outside of instructional units have a longer track record spanning decades, and greater capacity to enable this, numbering dozens of students each year. As one UH Mānoa faculty member working on workforce pathways shared:

“So a thing to think about [is] how to build more institutionalized pathways…It would be nice if the university had… a person who sits here at UH who works with the Department of Health from that level all the way up and across. Maybe that’s true of a whole set of state organizations, that they have these workforce people, but they’re all focused on pathways and other things. So it’d be nice to have that sort of liaison who could really consolidate this and build the pathway for paid practicums…. Because it’s just a lot of coordination and work and knowledge to do that. I think what we do is important, and I really appreciate the opportunity to do it, but to sustain it over time, you’d want to focus the funding, or get some more buy-in from a higher level of the university than a unit or a school.”

3.3 Features of Successful Pathway Programs

Within a university system, student development is supported by faculty and staff through both coursework-based and extra-curricular experiential and mentoring programs. Here, we call the latter “pathway” programs, and we investigated Hawai‘i educational and career pathway programs supporting participants ranging from high school students/GED and college undergraduates to working professionals. Administration of the programs included those fully internal to the 10-campus UH System (open only to students enrolled within a UH campus or system), programs run by university personnel (UH and other institutions) but facilitating broad student participation and access to off-campus opportunities, and programs fully external to academic institutions, providing relevant professional training and work experience to participants from a range of backgrounds and experience levels.

Program coordinators and directors described a variety of services and benefits to their program participants that we distilled into networking, experiential learning, paid opportunities, formalized mentoring and professional development (Table 2). Through online descriptions of programs, we also identified the programs’ relationships to the university (mostly UH Mānoa) and target audiences. Program coordinators work with students across a wide array of career stages from high school to working professionals. The Marine Option (certificate) Program is by far the oldest program, founded in the 1970s, with UH System-wide reach and a relatively lean budget. The much newer UH System Good Jobs Hawai‘i program engages multiple partners and focuses on workforce development within the two-year community colleges (2YC). Finally, a selection of popular internship programs that are run independently of the university by non-profits are also included for comparison. In the section below, directors and coordinators of long-standing pathways programs, and to a lesser extent faculty and alumni interviewees, shared valuable reflections on their personal experiences and their observations of the impact of these programs.

Table 2 summarizes a subset of programs considered or mentioned in this study along different dimensions: 1) embeddedness or affiliation with UH, 2) key common attributes (networking to formal professional development) and 3) participant career stage (high school to actively working).

Program Origins

We asked interviewees about the origins of these programs; how they started and evolved over time. Many programs were first established with a limited time frame or geographic focus that shifted over time. Several of the programs we interviewed emerged as part of an explicit effort to expand the boundaries of the conservation workforce in Hawai‘i. As one interviewee explained, their program “has always been in a really good position to challenge what conservation means and who gets to be involved…allow for students of the target audience, the ones that we are trying to get involved…to come from wherever they’re at. You don’t have to be already studying conservation to be a contributing member of this community.”

Another interviewee discussed their program’s origins as part of an effort to build pathways for more local youth from Hawai‘i to enter the conservation field.

“In the 90s and early 2000s, a lot of the interns would be people coming from out of state, and early entry-level hires into conservation fields were out-of-state because the pathways were more developed in places like Oregon, Washington, California, and Colorado. Our local youth did not know as much how to get into these fields. So what we saw was we were part of some of this new wave of organizations that were trying to get local youth engaged into the workforce in conservation or going to higher education.”

All of the program representatives we interviewed emphasized how they adapted and evolved over time in response to the needs of program participants and the broader communities they served. As one interviewee explained, “We’re iterating as we went along, and just understanding what the needs are and how [the program] could fit those needs.” The same interviewee gave an example describing how they realized that they needed to provide more support for youth participating in their program to obtain high school degrees so that they could secure jobs. In response they partnered with the Department of Education to create a program where youth could participate in the program, engage in ‘āina restoration work and also pursue a GED or high school diploma.

Another program that focuses on wastewater developed a commercial driver’s licensing program in response to sector needs,

“The CDL [commercial driver licensing] program came out kind of organically at one of our networking events. [This professional] does most of the pumping of the cesspools and septic tanks on Maui and he came and he was saying, ‘You know, I’m not really hiring right now for pumpers or operators. I’ve got enough of those. But what I need is some licensed truck drivers, because they’re driving all around the island and pumping, but you have to be licensed to drive these trucks.’ And that’s when the light bulb went off, and I went, ‘Oh, wait, I know the Hawaiian Trades Academy does that.’ So I set him up, and he hired somebody immediately and so then we were like, ‘How can we do more of this?’”

One program director emphasized the effort that goes into keeping their programming dynamic and responsive to employer needs.

“Having that dynamic sector partnership relationship, there’s monthly meetings; there’s more of a continuous loop of input on the in-demand jobs, what employers are hiring, and how do we really intentionally align the trainings that we can offer in the recruitment of students to line up with the jobs that are available?”

Core Elements

Several of the people we interviewed talked about applying a programmatic structure or framework that emphasizes abundance rather than deficit. In other words, focusing on identifying and nurturing the “gifts” of participants, rather than attempting to identify and fill gaps in skills or knowledge.

One interviewee described this approach saying they work with interns to “see what their gift is and what makes them shine, right? Because it’s not the same for everyone, right? And just because they don’t excel in a certain way doesn’t mean they don’t have the potential to excel in other ways, right?”

Another interviewee emphasized the importance of embracing skill sets and knowledge backgrounds that might not be obviously aligned with the conservation field, “We’ve had business and communication majors come through the program and do really amazing things for their communities, and for the ‘āina that they work with, so empowering them…to realize that they already have gifts.”

The idea of “empowering” program participants was mentioned by multiple interviewees and often connected to another core programmatic element of creating spaces of safety for youth, especially youth that do not feel welcome in STEM spaces.

“So I like empowering them, you know, when they come to our program, that they already know the answers. It’s a matter of uncovering them and challenging them to be motivated enough to pursue them to find it all out…That model of every child has a gift and really just making the environment safe and challenging at the same time to bring it out.”

Another interviewee connected this environment of safety and support directly to the retention of participants in their program:

“For me, the most important thing to keep the interns here is making sure that they feel safe in a place that they can succeed in, right? Because the way the system is created is like…they’re not creating it to be successful, right? So we have to create those little safe havens where you might have the extra support or that extra push or that extra positivity to keep you going, right?”

Nearly all program representatives emphasized repeatedly the importance of relationships and building trust with participants as essential to their overall operations and long-term successes. They also highlighted that building and maintaining these relationships requires a lot of dedicated staff and intensive resources. One interviewee described how their program uses “navigators” that form one-on-one relationships with participants to provide comprehensive support services: “Navigators are really also there to provide that wraparound support. So if [program participants] need tutoring, they can refer them for that. If they need certain basic needs, they can also support them, like we had funding for gas cards and things like that, childcare.”

Most of the programs we included in the study paid participants for their involvement in professional development experiences including internships and fellowships. However, many programs also provided more comprehensive support beyond salary such as securing and paying for housing or covering the costs of books. One program director described how the need to offer regular meals for program participants who came from food insecure communities led to the development of a cooking program to feed participants which eventually evolved into a culinary training program. “Even though it’s not traditionally a green job, we’re going to do a culinary program to try to support our local farmers and give kids the skill set to cook for themselves, but also to gain job skills in this area.”

Many of the programs also provide significant support and services not just to their program participants but also to the mentors and mentor organizations they partner with. A few interviewees mentioned that the benefits of their work to mentors and mentoring institutions was under-appreciated and sometimes not fully considered as part of their metrics of success. Examples of these benefits included mentorship training. As one interviewee described, “mentors came to us and said they wanted help mentoring…It’s almost all engineers and technicians, and so they’re not working with students day in and day out…They wanted a lot more input on how to mentor.” In many cases, the programs did the administrative work of recruiting, managing the application process, interviewing and selecting candidates, hiring, and paying mentees. As one interviewee explained, this administrative support alleviates a lot of the burdens not just for non-profit partners but also government agencies:

“We take care of all the HR, the payroll, trainings for young people, so that our sites don’t have to worry about it…Not only is that a benefit to the smaller nonprofits, but even our governmental partners because they have so much traditional red tape to hire someone and bring someone on board. And, you know, it’s just so much easier and quicker when we can just partner together that way. So we have a lot of standing [memorandums of understanding] and master service agreements with their government partners too.”

Some programs go beyond alleviating administrative burdens and work to enhance capacity of the host or mentor organization as well. As an interviewee described, “We currently provide them with our young people to serve and build their capacity. At the same time we’re helping. We provide trainings to the [hosts] about management and just best practices on certain things to help them grow as organizations.”

Recruitment

When asked about how they recruit participants, all of our interviewees emphasized the importance of word-of-mouth connections and personal relationships. As one interviewee shared, “I still think that the best way is those individual champions like teachers or counselors or family members that are going to just encourage people. Places like Moloka‘i, it’s like everyone’s brother and sister has been in our program.” Alumni networks also play a very important role. According to one interviewee, “Word-of-mouth, I think, works a lot for our program. Going through our alumni network is a big one.”

One program with strong ties to the UH System found that connection to be an advantage in their recruitment efforts:

“Is there an advantage of having this based at the university?… That this is where the majority of students, of our audiences, are going, either here at UH or connected with these two- and four-year institutions here, and in the Pacific. So it’s a good setting for that. I was just talking with somebody from [a program external to the University], and some of the challenges of trying to do it externally, because you’re not a part of these pathways that these students are experiencing.”

Another interviewee described their partnership with community-based organizations to reach target participants more effectively: “We do have sub awards with some community organizations to support that kind of outreach and recruitment work for those [harder to reach] communities.”

At the same time, social media is playing an increasingly important role in recruitment. For example, some programs are innovating recruitment via social media by partnering with social media influencers to get the word out about opportunities.

Retention and Metrics of Success

Most of the programs we examined consider the long-term trajectory of their participants as their primary indicator of success. They want to see program participants secure employment or pursue a degree in a particular field. Many of the programs also think about the personal growth and quality of relationships that participants form as key measures of success.

One interviewee leading a program within the UH System described the long-term nature of their program’s views on retention:

“In a way, our retention goes beyond just the educational component to those other steps to actually getting a job. So I think that connecting all of those pieces in the pathway is probably a unique approach that I haven’t seen at UH before… So I think retention for us is unique in that it’s actually seeing the student progress through that entire series of steps to ultimately securing the job or advancing in their career.”

Most of the individuals we interviewed discussed the challenges associated with tracking long-term trajectories of their participants, particularly using methods that rely on alumni surveys. This tracking process requires significant time and staff resources.

“[We] conduct regular longitudinal studies and find that interns consistently stay in STEM pathways 87-88% of the time. That’s what kept us sort of funded all of this time, probably more. Once we got into…a data set with hundreds, we then could look at … demographics, and so we can see that holds across genders, it holds across different groups, like underrepresented minority groups, community college, four year institutions. So that’s probably the more compelling evidence… It’s consistent where you would normally see disparities. We have the same sort of high persistence rate…That’s what everybody is interested in. That’s what people want. People want numbers…The thing that keeps the money coming is those numbers. It’s a lot of work, though; I have to tell you, it is.”

Another interviewee discussed the importance of time for alumni to gain perspective on how relationships developed through the program have impacted their long-term career trajectory.

“[Alumni] say at the end of the summer…‘Oh yeah, this was…kind of valuable’, and then five years later, they’re like, ‘That was the most important thing I ever did.’ So having that longitudinal ability to stay connected to …alumni, and going back to them and saying, how does this rank within your different experiences…And it’s always …either super valuable in like giving them very applicable skills, that’s one. But, almost always, it is helping them develop the relationships and the connections into these communities and spaces.”

Notably the challenges of tracking many alumni over years or even decades has led some programs to develop complex and innovative data management systems. For example, one interviewee described a customized case management system their program developed for supporting participants.

“We’ve had over 12,000 applications through the website over these four years, and so for every one of those people, we actually have a full data set on what their career goals are, what they were interested in, what their employment status is, their educational background demographics…as the students completed. So we’ve had about 6,500 students enroll and complete programs. Now we can continue to support them as lifelong learners…What’s unique about this system is that it actually integrates non-credit course history…So we have both credit and non-credit, you know, educational case files for each student… It’ll enable us to provide a more robust kind of advising going forward.”

A number of interviewees talked about the difficulty of aligning the quantitative metrics that are important to funders with the more complex and often qualitative impacts of their programming.

“When it comes to success, and especially when you think about funders…It’s all about numbers. It’s all about that person being identified or compared to a mass right?…There’s this practice that I built into my curriculum…which is ulu which means growth, right? And then there’s a ulu papakū segment to it and ulu papamoe. Ulu papakū literally means to grow vertically. So it’s a concept of their own individual growth and how do they reach the next nu‘u and what does that look like to the connection to themselves, to those who came before them, to their mo‘okū‘auhau. And then there’s ulu papamoe, which is the connection to the community, the connection to each other…If you think of the ulu tree, it’s like the roots that bind us together, right…I feel like for us to measure success and growth. It’s a very case-by-case thing and you have to take the time to…learn the stories of them.”

Lessons Learned

When asked about what lessons they learned from their years of running programs, directors and coordinators highlighted some key concepts. Many emphasized that relationships and developing trust across staff and program participants is important for an impactful program.As one interviewee explained:

“Having a program versus just opportunities is what makes this valuable. So it’s not just me as an individual having an experience and I’m processing it. It is having that staff and program that is really weaving that together, weaving people together, relationships together, and the learning together.”

Strong relationships with employers or mentor organizations were also critical to the success of programs. One director explained the effort their program put in to fostering dynamic partnership with potential employers:

“And by having that dynamic sector partnership relationship, there’s basically like monthly meetings, there’s more of a continuous loop of input on what are the in demand jobs, what employers are hiring, and how do we really intentionally align the trainings that we can offer in the recruitment of students to line up with the jobs that are available?”

Several program representatives also discussed the importance of allowing space and time for iterative growth of the program and the individuals involved in the program. As one interviewee explained, “[The program] has always been iterative. It’s always grown, and with the growing of the program comes the growing of the people within that program, and also the continuity of that program to its alumni, and really trusting in those alumni.”

Another person we interviewed talked about the importance of strategically directing growth and iteration.

“We have things that are sometimes on the back burner, but they’re…not ripe yet, you know, so that we have to let them just kind of sit there. But sometimes, you know certain things that are ripe. We look at the timing. And so I guess one suggestion I have is you can’t be everything to everyone. So I’m talking now. This is our 18 year process, and we’ve also, by the way, pruned out programs over the years that just didn’t make sense anymore, because you only have so much energy and bandwidth. So I would also encourage that you don’t want to try to be everything to everyone. You want to be strategic.”

This strategic focus also connects to the importance of knowing the core motivation as a program, the “why” as an interviewee explained: “Having that intention, like, why are we doing this? Or how this is linked to your community? [That] has been really important with this program and its evolution, how it’s serving place.”

Particularly for programs working in the space with large systemic challenges, one interviewee discussed the need to keep youth grounded with tangible solutions.

“Seeing that full picture, like seeing the problems that exist, but being able to see the solutions as well, I think is really inspiring and motivating… [Because] it’s very depressing, talking about these issues right? And you can feel really defenseless or helpless sometimes when you’re not equipped with the right tools…Exploring other ways of learning, or fighting the good fight, I think, is super important.”

Finally we heard about the importance of supporting existing successful and established programs rather than “reinventing the wheel.”

“I think if we can just create more depth in the existing organizations, like I was sharing, you know, more business administrative skills, more resources, better practices and infrastructure in the organization. All those things will help them to be stronger and I think sometimes …nonprofits will fundraise, but it’s to keep their lights on. But you know, we want people to …advance the needle. So I’m very much an advocate of, how do we bolster the existing nonprofits?”

4. From STEM pipelines to networked ‘auwai

From our interviews, we identified a rich set of perspectives and ideas to support strengthened wai pathways. Although some universities host integrated and multidisciplinary water resources curricula within a single department, at UH Mānoa, water-related courses reside across different departments. This decentralization makes it challenging for students to find and navigate appropriate coursework, degree pathways, and opportunities and may explain the student perception that UH Mānoa water-specific course offerings are limited. The Institute for Sustainability and Resilience BA was set up to address the dispersed nature of sustainability courses, but tailoring this for water remains a challenge and opportunity.

At the same time, some faculty hold a perception of limited student interest, based on limited course enrollment. The dispersed nature of water-related disciplinary training also complicates employer efforts to connect with and recruit potential employees; it leaves most recruitment to paths through key personal contacts, which potentially contributes to employer perception that students are not interested in, nor properly qualified to work in the local water sector. Interestingly, multiple faculty also shared an impression that there are limited job opportunities in the Hawai‘i water sector, which is not supported by findings from interviews with employers in Phase 1 of this study (Bremer et al. 2025).

Solutions emerged from the interviews, as former students, faculty, and pathway program personnel all articulated clear calls for better coordination across multiple scales. Some referred to this as “connective tissue,” describing not just the coordination across different academic units but also the strategic partnerships with off-campus organizations from local communities to state agencies to achieve mutual benefits and objectives. As participants stressed in both their work and interview/feedback, the training infrastructure should extend beyond research, beyond credit-only disciplinary pathways, beyond UH Mānoa to include the community colleges and non-credit programs and other professional training pathways. Especially important to trainee success and program longevity is the knowledge base of individuals in non-instructional program coordination roles that have sustained relationships with partner organizations and employers, recruited and supported success of non-traditional talent pools, facilitated transformative experiential learning opportunities, and helped students navigate their way into stable and satisfying careers. Strengthening connections across instructional and experiential/ non-instructional efforts within the UH System and local partners is likely to benefit both students and the community of water stewards from engineering divisions to NGOs. Furthermore, strengthening connections both within UH Mānoa and beyond can also stimulate new collaborations and cross-training necessary for addressing Hawai‘i’s complex water challenges through multi-disciplinary/multi-sectoral approaches and teams.

What can such coordination look like? Although the “workforce pipeline” metaphor has been used to describe programs to increase student recruitment, retention, matriculation, and job placement, the unidirectional and linear pipeline metaphor is not only problematic (e.g., Cannady et al. 2014), it also fails to capture the diffuse and networked educational infrastructure of water-related courses, mentors, and internships available to trainees in the islands. We find resonance with a more locally-relevant and flexible metaphor of the educational ‘auwai (irrigation ditch system) described initially by Goodyear-Kaʻōpua (2009) in terms of Indigenous education and extended to STEM post-high school education by interviewee Kaleialoha Lum-Ho, former director of Hūlili Ke Kukui (Honolulu Community College) and now at UH Mānoa supporting student success. The educational ‘auwai metaphor emphasizes maintaining system connectivity to ensure flow. Here students are recruited from the kahawai (pool of potential students), guided through the ‘auwai (student support and personal development), and enriched as they circulate and grow in the lo‘i (representing disciplinary or professional training), ultimately maturing at the loko i‘a (representing program completion/matriculation). Finally, Lum-Ho’s STEM ‘auwai framework speaks to the closing of the system when graduates ho‘i to that which raised them, returning as mentors to support the cycle anew, paralleling the continuity of the hydrologic cycle as water vapor returns as rainfall to saturate the life-giving headwaters.

Because the metaphor centers trainee growth and system connectivity, it is freed from the pipeline’s narrow focus that sees trainees on a single potentially ill-fitting path and recognizes trainee aspirations and constraints that shape their decision-making. We hope it stimulates curiosity, creativity, and collaboration in the design of an educational ‘auwai system for wai, an invitation for broad collective support to sustain and maintain it, from individual mentors who train and mālama students to supportive institutional environments.

Key Insights

The following are key takeaways from  interviews with university faculty, alumni, and non-instructional program coordinators or directors. Takeaways are based on perceptions of interviewees and are subject to revision with further discussion and research.

1. Interviewee career pathways were often shaped by connections to family and place (especially for ‘ōiwi and kama‘āina interviewees), mentors (inside and outside of academia), and funding availability.
2. There are many water-related courses on the books already offered by UH and many faculty with water relevant expertise. These tend to be scattered across different departments because of the broad multi-disciplinary nature of water stewardship.
3. Overall interviewees felt that despite strong wai course offerings across the UH System there was a lack of coordination or visibility of water courses and a need for clearer connections between curriculum and employment opportunities.
   • Alignment of courses and programmatic offerings requires improving faculty awareness of each other and awareness of existing strengths within and between individual departments, units, and colleges through more proactive collaboration and faculty dual appointments.
   • In addition to enhanced faculty awareness and collaboration, dedicated leadership would help to facilitate cohesive pathways for students navigating their educational pathways to wai careers.
   • Students are often unaware of how their course decisions impact long-term career options. There is a need for stronger connections between coursework, skills, and career opportunities.
4. Despite the absence of a singular wai degree pathway, several existing programs offer UH Mānoa undergraduate freshwater pathways and options. Faculty and program coordinators help students navigate their academic journeys and find relevant wai courses using informal referral networks built on pre-existing relationships.
5. Interviewees discussed a variety of ideas for credited and non-credited wai education options.
   • Certificate programs can offer multidisciplinary learning opportunities but some certificate programs struggle to achieve sufficient enrollment numbers.
   • A cross disciplinary Wai 100 course could provide a broad view of knowledge and expertise involved in freshwater management.
   • Other suggestions for addressing curricular gaps through development of new courses or non-credit training modules, or hiring faculty to teach: water planning in Hawai‘i, holistic water economics, water conservation and agricultural water resource management, and environmental health.
6. The UH System has strong research infrastructure and existing mechanisms for student research. However, there is support among faculty and alumni for more experiential learning opportunities and curriculum incorporating place- and culture-based learning.
   • There is a high demand for coursework, capstone projects, internships, and research opportunities connected to real world water stewardship. This is being met in some departments (such as DURP, Hawai‘inuiākea, and Law School) but could be expanded in others.
   • Stronger connections between student research and water resource management also offers a potential avenue for students to connect with non-academic mentoring and jobs.
   • There are real challenges to increasing experiential learning based on limited time and funding. 
   • More place-based examples could be incorporated into existing courses as a way to bring water issues and cultural and historic context into the classroom.
   • Several interviewees called for deeper respect for ancestral knowledge and relationships to place in university education programs and faculty approaches to student mentorship and research.
7. Faculty understanding of and connection to water sector employers plays a key role in student access to career pathways.
   • Faculty who have strong networks and experience outside of academia are better equipped to support their students’ professional development and experiential learning opportunities.
   • To align degree and training pathways better with employment sector needs, faculty understanding of job opportunities and professional realm requirements should be improved.
   • Successful job placement is supported by strong relationships of individual faculty members and employers who open doors to internships and advanced training or full-time employment. These connections can be lost with personnel turnover. 
8. Personnel from successful education and career pathway programs emphasized a few key aspects of their programming approaches:
   • Programs are adaptive allowing space and time for iterative growth of the program and the individuals involved in the program. They are also strategic and intentional in their evolution keeping focus on core motivations and values.
   • Programs emphasize nurturing the “gifts” of participants rather than attempting to identify and fill gaps in skills or knowledge.
   • Relationships are central and developing trust across staff and program participants is important for an impactful program. Successful programs offered intensive mentoring relationships requiring significant staff time and resources.
   • Most of the programs included paid participants for their involvement in professional development experiences including internships and fellowships. Many programs also provided more comprehensive support beyond salary such as housing, food, childcare, and transportation. 
   • Successful programs also provide administrative services for hosting organizations, such as recruiting, managing the application process, interviewing and selecting candidates, hiring, and paying mentees. Some programs go beyond alleviating administrative burdens and also work to enhance the capacity of the host or mentor organization itself.
9. These programs consider the long-term trajectory of their participants as their primary indicator of success. They want to see program participants secure employment or pursue a degree in a particular field. Many of the programs also think about the personal growth and quality of relationships that participants form as key measures of success.
   • Tracking these metrics of success required intensive longitudinal methods that are resource and time intensive.
   • There is at times a disconnect between funder metrics of success which focus on very short-term qualitative metrics and the most holistic concepts of personal and communal growth which are valued by programs.
10. Curricular and institutional siloing and fragmentation are contributing to bottlenecks in Hawai‘i’s water workforce. Pairing updated, holistic conceptualizations of wai, student development, and water pathways with leadership to support coordination and system alignments should help overcome current challenges.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Hawaiian Islands Environmental Finance Center of the Hawai‘i Community Foundation for their support of this work and all those who gave their time and insight to this report through interviews and workshop engagement including individuals affiliated with:

Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering, UH Mānoa

Department of Earth Sciences, UH Mānoa

Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, UH Mānoa

Department of Oceanography, UH Mānoa

Department of Public Health Science, UH Mānoa

Good Jobs Hawai‘i

Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, UH Mānoa

Marine Option Program, UH System

Pacific Biosciences Research Center, UH Mānoa

Pacific Internship Programs for Exploring Science, UH Hilo

Sierra Club of Hawai‘i

Society of Native Hawaiian Engineers

Water Resources Research Center, UH Mānoa

UH Economic Research Organization, UH Mānoa

Citations

Beamer, K. (Ed.). (2025). Waiwai: Water and the future of Hawai‘i. University of Hawai‘i Press.

Bremer, L., Wong S., Hintzen, K., & Kagawa-Viviani, A. (2025). Supporting thriving water futures through education and career pathways: Perspectives from the Hawai‘i water sector. University of Hawai‘i Economic Research Organization (UHERO). https://uhero.hawaii.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/SupportingThrivingWaterFutures.pdf

Camkin, J., & Neto, S, (2013). New learning foundations for building water knowledge bridges. Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, 150 (1), 72–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1936-704X.2013.03137.x

Cannady, M. A., Greenwald, E., & Harris, K. N. (2014). Problematizing the STEM pipeline metaphor: Is the STEM pipeline metaphor serving our students and the STEM workforce? Science Education, 98(3), 443–460. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21108

Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, N. (2009). Rebuilding the ‘auwai: Connecting ecology, economy and education in Hawaiian schools. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 5(2), 46–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/117718010900500204

Haw. Const. art. XI, § 7. https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/hrscurrent/Vol01_Ch0001-0042F/05-CONST/CONST_0011-0007.htm

Haw. Rev. Stat. § 174C-2(a) (1987). https://files.hawaii.gov/dlnr/cwrm/regulations/Code174C.pdf

Kame‘eleihiwa, L. (1992). Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea Lā E Pono Ai? Bishop Museum Press.

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^[1] Mālama ‘āina refers to the reciprocal kinship between kānaka (people) and ‘āina. As Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa describes, “it is the reciprocal duty of the elder siblings to hānai (feed) the younger ones, as well as to love and ho‘omalu (protect) them. The relationship is thereby further defined: it is the ‘Āina, the kalo, and the Ali‘i Nui who are to feed, clothe, and shelter their younger brothers and sisters, the Hawaiian people. So long as younger Hawaiians love, serve, and honor their elders, the elders will continue to do the same for them, as well as to provide for all their physical needs. Clearly, by this equation, it is the duty of Hawaiians to mālama ‘āina, and, as a result of this proper behavior, the ‘Āina will mālama Hawaiians” (1992).