Research On The Graduate Education Of American Agricultural Extension Education

It is far-reaching significance to establish the Master’s degree of Agricultural Extension (MAE) for China’s agricultural modernization and rural development as well as the reform and development of agricultural graduate education. In order to improving the quality of agricultural extension officers, agricultural communicators, agricultural technology specialists, agricultural production and processing managers, promoting communication and collaboration of universities with the productive sector, and accelerating the speed of the sciences and technologies to be changed to productive forces, China has established MAE since1999.After ten years of development, the enrollment scale of MAE is increasing year by year, as well as enrollment units, but MAE is still in development stage. American graduate education and agricultural extension education linked closely together, and the features are prominent. To explore the ways of cultivation of American MAE, and improve and perfect the graduate education of China’s MAE on the basis of the reference and innovation with American MAE, which is conducive to China’s agricultural development of higher education and agricultural human capital accumulation.The method of document and analysis, case study and the comparative study are the main methods to be used in this paper. This article researches the history of the development of American agricultural extension education, and analyses the master degree program of four universities-New Mexico State University, University of Arkansas, Colorado State University, Virginia Tech University-as a case study with first-hand informative data, researches and reviews the culture of MAE with the four universities. There are seven features with American MAE on the aspects of objective, application conditions, the ways of cultivation, curriculum, guidance and supervision, evaluation, degrees awarded. Weakening professional backgrounds, broadening students source, strengthening inter-school cooperation, and exploring varieties of cultivation methods, which are revelations for China’s MAE.