ATLANTA

Next year, Justan Holloway’s class schedule will look like the plot of an action movie: The college student will study international terrorism, disaster planning, criminology, social psychology and Arabic.

Holloway plans to be among the first to enroll in Savannah State University’s new degree program in homeland security.

The program is among a growing number of its kind as U.S. colleges try to meet rising demand for specialists trained in national defense and emergency management.

Graduates are finding themselves attractive to government agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as to defense contractors and other companies, where they do such things as create emergency management plans and design gas masks.

Some programs focus on terrorism and manmade threats. Others, such as Savannah State’s, also train students to help with natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast last year.

“After the Katrina situation, I didn’t like the way FEMA handled it,” sys Holloway, 19. “I was like, ‘Maybe I can make a difference.’”

More than 300 colleges offer some type of instruction in homeland security, a trend that began soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to the National Academic Consortium for Homeland Security, which started three years ago with just a few institutions and is based at The Ohio State University.

Dr. Todd Stewart, director of the consortium, says the college programs generally do not run background checks on applicants to weed out terrorists who might be looking for inside information on the nation’s defenses.

He says foreigners applying for student visas are already subject to screening, which has become more rigorous since Sept. 11. Also, he points out that college programs are not teaching sensitive information that isn’t widely available elsewhere.

Critics say that awarding degrees in homeland security is pointless because the field is too broad and generic. It would be better to major in a specific aspect of national defense, such as Middle Eastern studies or cybersecurity, says Dr. Steven Lab, head of the criminal justice department at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.