At this university, every undergraduate is required to take a course on sustainability

Regardless of what a college student majors in, they are often required to take some general classes in order to graduate, like courses in math or the humanities. At Arizona State University, beginning this fall, students are now also required to take a class on sustainability.

That sustainability requirement can be filled with a few course options. A class called “Wilderness and Parks in America” dives into conservation, and the relationship between the environment and recreation. “The Sustainable Plate” explores the food system and how someone’s dietary choices affect not only their own health, but the environment (and the people who produce our food). A course titled “Society, Supply Chains and You” touches on how supply chains work, focusing on where products come from and how the sustainability of certain resources can come into play.

These courses are meant to highlight how interdisciplinary the topic of sustainability is, says Anne Jones, vice provost for undergraduate education at ASU. In 2006, 18 years ago, ASU founded its School of Sustainability, the first such school in the U.S. “That was deliberately created as an interdisciplinary school to be a focus for students and research and social commitment to sustainability . . . so it would encompass natural scientists and social scientists and humanists and technologists and all those sorts of people,” Jones says.

But in the past decade, ASU has been thinking about how to require sustainability courses not just for students within that specific school, but for everyone. “Sustainability, many of us would argue, is one of the most significant challenges facing humanity at present,” she says. ASU’s charter asks the university to be responsible for the “economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves,” and those, Jones says, are “all things that are connected to sustainability.”

The sustainability requirement was added as part of an overhaul of ASU’s general studies requirements, the courses that all undergraduates must complete. Those requirements were last formally set in the 1980s, but revised for the Fall 2024 academic year and on. As part of the revision, ASU set certain learning outcomes for each category of required class, informed by workshops faculty held with students.

“One of the things that became clear from the workshops was that students wanted the category and the content to be presented in a way that was actionable and it was relevant for their lives,” Jones says. “We were being told very directly, ‘we don’t need a class to be told stuff. We need a class to be able to sift through things, to make decisions.’”

Students also wanted the sustainability requirement to be framed in a positive way, rather than “doom and gloom.” “[We heard] ‘We don’t want to hear about the end of the world. We don’t want to hear about dystopia. We want to know what agency we have as individuals,’” Jones adds.

Students today already understand the threat of climate change and the importance of sustainability when studying everyone from engineering to business. A 2023 survey by Inside Higher Ed found that 81% of students were either “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about climate change.

And students tend to want their schools, and their future workplaces, to emphasize sustainability. According to a 2022 survey by the Yale Center for Business and the Environment, 70% of students want more experiential learning focused on sustainability; 62% want career services to focus on sustainable roles; and 81% want to help their employees improve their sustainability practices.

ASU isn’t alone in answering these calls. Many universities now have majors focused on sustainability and climate change, along with specialized schools devoted to those studies. Beginning Fall 2024, The University of California, San Diego is also requiring all students take a course on climate change in order to earn a bachelor’s degree. Recently, the Aspen Institute released a Higher Ed Climate Action Plan that called for all universities to both make their campuses more sustainable, and to prepare students to be successful in a changing climate through education.

“I think it’s important for us as educators, not just at ASU but more broadly, to recognize that students [will] work in different jobs throughout their careers, and we know that the 21st century problems they’re approaching are interdisciplinary,” Jones says. She mentions AI as an example of an emerging issue, one inherently tied to energy use and water resources.

“We need to be really careful about how we are creating the skills for students to navigate these new spaces as they emerge, and I think the sustainability requirement reflects that,” she adds. “It’s deliberately asking students to come to terms with something significant, interdisciplinary, and to learn to think about it from different perspectives.”