Everyone who took the national board exam in 2012 passed it at Community College of Baltimore County’s Catonsville campus. The associate degree program prepares you to meet the Maryland requirement of 1,000 apprenticeship hours, 20 funeral assists and 20 embalming assists. Students at American Academy McAllister Institute of Funeral Service in New York, N.Y., have had a 97 percent pass rate on the board exam since 1995. The program lasts 12 to 16 months. Fine Mortuary College of Nowood, Massachusetts has a 15- to 18-month program. You’ll cover a broad range of disciplines: social sciences, anatomy, pathology, accounting, computer skills and funeral service law.
East Mississippi Community College’s campus in Scooba, Mississippi, offers a two-year funeral service technology program. The program reinforces the need to be compassionate to families who have lost loved ones and to be knowledgeable of health and safety concerns when handling human remains. Tidewater Community College in Virginia Beach, Virginia, has a funeral service program that covers everything from embalming bodies to ethics and sound management principles to how to set up and maintain an OSHA sanctioned preparation room.
University of Minnesota in Minneapolis offers a Bachelor of Science degree in mortuary science. The program is run out of the university medical school and treats its students as future health care professionals. Morticians must cater to clients’ needs in much the same way as grief counselors, according to this program. The University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, Oklahoma, offers both a baccalaureate degree and certificate program. The school offers some online classes and has a coed funeral service fraternity, Sigma Phi Sigma.
Mount Hood Community College in Gresham, Oregon, offers an associate degree program in funeral service education. You’ll take classes in medical terminology, English composition, business law, psychology and algebra in this program, which runs two years and includes two winter terms. American River College in Sacramento, California, started its funeral service program in 2002. The program is designed to give you theory-based on-campus instruction and clinical experience in off-site funeral parlors that will help you land an entry level job in the field.