Northern Virginia Community College offers the Public History and Historic Preservation Career Studies Certificate at the Loudoun campus in Sterling, VA. The program was originally developed in 1995 with the assistance of Lyle Rosenberger (Bucks County Community College), Constance Ramirez (Chief Preservation Officer of the US Army) and Lin Ezell (Chief of Collections Management for the Air and Spaced Museum).
Being a state-funded community college, we fit the program within the framework of a certificate program and designed it to provide an introduction into the field for students to find entry level job or volunteer positions with historical sites and/or organizations in Northern Virginia. For students who did decided that they wanted to transfer to an undergraduate program to pursue their studies, Gary Stanton and later Morton Brown at Mary Washington University (Fredericksburg, VA) offered support for our program and helped to establish the transfer of some courses.
The certificate program is listed as part of the National Council on Public History’s guide to nationally recognized public history programs and is one of the few community colleges in the entire country that offer these programs at the undergraduate level.