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In high school, Emily Rudd never cared for home economics classes.

"Oh God, they were awful. It was old school," says Ms. Rudd, now 22. "You learned how to cook potatoes. I never was very much of a success in that department."

So imagine her surprise when she discovered that her "human ecology" major at university was actually a new name for her old nemesis, home economics.

"I was like, what are you talking about?" Ms. Rudd recalls. She was learning about progressive community-building, systematic approaches to problem-solving and global interconnectedness - not an overcooked potato in sight.

Welcome to the new world of home economics. Baking cakes and sewing pillowcases are out; reducing childhood obesity and developing community-based solutions to poverty are in.

Ms. Rudd graduated from the University of Alberta last spring and now works for Vibrant Communities Edmonton, where she's run a variety of projects from financial literacy classes for teens to a tax-preparation program for low-income workers. "I absolutely fell in love with it," Ms. Rudd says. "It was aligning with what I believed in life."

While many university-level home economics programs have disappeared in recent decades, cast aside as relics from the 1950s, the programs that did survive are thriving under various new names. In Canada, it's called human ecology; in the United States, it's now family and consumer sciences. Both name changes happened in the 1990s.

"There is just a renewed interest in these areas," says Kathryn Chandler, practicum co-ordinator for the human ecology department at the University of Alberta.

Ms. Chandler says her department has seen about a 30-per-cent increase in enrolment each year for the past four years. Demand has begun to level out this year, but student interest remains high, especially for nutrition classes.

Other schools report similar increases. At Brescia University College in London, Ont., enrolment in the food and nutritional science program has grown from 60 a few years ago to more than 100 this fall.

"I have a lot of students coming from other disciplines; we cannot accommodate everybody," says Alicia Garcia, department chairwoman.

Part of home ec's resurgence can be credited to that powerful cultural engine, reality television. Flip through the channels and you're almost guaranteed to see a show dedicated to one of the three traditional platforms of home economics: food and nutrition (The Biggest Loser, any cooking show); family (A Baby Story, Supernanny); and clothing (What Not to Wear, Project Runway).

"In apparel design, we probably had about 10 students a year. Then, Lord have mercy, Project Runway came along and we have them hanging from the rafters," says Virginia Richards, director-at-large of the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences and an associate dean at Georgia Southern University.

The new home economics has retained those three pillars, for the most part, but the emphasis has changed. The old curriculum taught women how to feed, clothe and nurture their own families. Now the focus has shifted outward, to caring for the larger community.

Depending on their area of concentration, human ecology students might study family counselling, financial literacy, food safety, nutrition or fashion marketing. Courses offered this fall at the University of Alberta include Intimate Relationships, Families and Aging, and Survey of Historical Dress.

The field of home economics got its formal start in 1899, when a group of experts in what was then known as the domestic arts and sciences got together and decided they needed a modern-sounding name. The idea of economics of the home tapped into the turn-of-the-century fascination with efficiency.

Home economics prepared countless women for lives running the family home - and tormented countless high-school students with silly cooking classes - but modern practitioners like to point out it also gave women a professional, academic path at a time when few other options existed.

"Home economics or human ecology is very much a feminist field," Ms. Chandler says. "The field was the very first legitimate foray of women into the field of science. It's unfortunate that women's work is demeaned in our culture."

As more university students discover the new home economics, experts hope they'll finally be able to erase the June Cleaver stigma that has tainted the field for so long. While the name and the focus of their field have evolved, home economists say the heart of their work remains the same - using knowledge to improve daily life.

"You would still recognize it as home economics," Dr. Garcia says, "but we have to change with the times."

Old school still an option

While most home economists are shedding their old image as Betty Crocker wannabes and turning their focus to the larger community, one school is going back to the past for inspiration - way back.

A Baptist university in Texas has started offering a women-only homemaking program this year that, according to the school's website, "endeavors to prepare women to model the characteristics of the godly woman as outlined in Scripture."

Apparently, godly women do a lot of cooking, cleaning, child care and sewing, and they don't work outside the home. The program launched this year in response to demand from students, says Terri Stovall, dean of women's programs at the College at Southwestern in Fort Worth, Texas.

"Mom and grandma are just not there to teach them the way it used to be taught," Dr. Stovall says.

"Whether a woman works outside the home or not, the home is still their first priority," she says. "We want them to understand that's a noble calling."

The homemaking concentration currently has 25 students enrolled, but Dr. Stovall says she's hoping the program will attract more students next year. Mainstream home economists - now called human ecologists or family and consumer scientists - are intrigued by the notion but not tempted to turn back the clock in their field.

"Very interesting," says Virginia Richards, associate dean of the college of health and human sciences at Georgia Southern University.

"That would be going back to what we did in home economics before. We're not doing that now."

Rebecca Dube