Schools from Montana to New York are offering degrees in climate change. Here’s what they entail

There’s a new degree in higher education.

In response to rising student demand, many universities across the country have started to offer degrees focused specifically on addressing climate change, alongside existing degrees in subjects like environmental science and policy.

Although there are clear overlaps, these new degrees are novel in their interdisciplinary focus. The programs emphasize climate solutions and developments in the real world, countering the idea of the university as an ivory tower and rethinking the role of undergraduate higher education.

As fighting the climate crisis becomes more imperative, students with strengths in every discipline will need to play a role. At the University of Montana, the climate change studies minor is designed to complement a variety of programs, with students coming from between 20 and 25 majors each year. The courses cover everything from ecosystems to global economics to literature—all with a focus on climate change. The idea is that through the program students will be forced out of their comfort zone and can engage with others from different programs across campus.

“We want as wide a spectrum as we can get, to really approach the question of how society responds to crisis,” says Peter McDonough, director of the climate change studies program at the University of Montana.

Columbia University offers a climate systems science major, which it launched in September 2023. It, too, is very interdisciplinary, requiring students to take courses on environmental science, natural science, climate systems, and policy or communications. Yet Joerg Schaefer, the director of undergraduate studies who led the development of this major, says Columbia is still looking to broaden its offerings. A climate and sustainability major, which will focus more on real-world applications, will be offered starting in September 2024, and an engineering-focused climate physics and chemistry major is in the works, with a target start date of September 2025.

Both programs emphasize teaching students about ways to combat climate change, offering “solutions courses” that look at why solving the climate crisis is so difficult—even though many of the solutions are already well-known. The courses aim to prepare students to take on these problems regardless of their career choice.

McDonough says one of the key things students struggle with is determining how their skills and interests fit into the larger fight against the climate crisis, on both a personal and professional level.

“We want to help students figure out, what’s the next easiest thing for you to do?” McDonough says. “For some people that’s going to be activism and getting involved legislatively. For others, it’s going to be a dietary change, or having climate conversations with family members who are climate deniers.”

Montana’s climate change minor also requires an internship or capstone. These projects vary widely, from working at a local farm to assisting a documentary filmmaker to interning with senators in Washington, D.C., or think tanks in New York City. “What we really need students to do is to take a climate awareness with them, whatever career they end up pursuing,” McDonohugh says.

He cites two former students who graduated from Montana with majors in journalism and minors in climate change studies. During the 2021 Northwest heat dome that caused an estimated 1,400 deaths, two local news outlets in Missoula assigned the jobs for reporting on the crisis to these former students. Having acquired a deep knowledge of the subject through the program, the reporters were able to write more informed stories, collaborating with the local climate office to explain to the public how exactly the heat wave was caused by climate change.

“So all the news coming out of Missoula about the heat dome had a climate element,” McDonough says. “Anyone reading that got a little extra education about how climate change works.”

And although climate change isn’t a specific industry, the job market has indeed exploded for graduates with climate science educations.

“There are a variety of companies regularly interested in our climate science students at Columbia,” Schaefer says. “The most prominent are insurance companies and Wall Street companies. All of them now have climate experts in their workforce.” The need for new solutions in the property insurance industry has become particularly pressing in recent months, as climate risks have become so high that it’s now difficult to keep both residents protected and insurance businesses afloat.

Despite the fact that it has been around for only two years, climate systems science at Columbia has become an extremely attractive major. Schaefer says the demand is so high that soon the school will struggle to offer enough classes—something incredibly rare at a school as well resourced as Columbia.

Although finance remains the most popular career option for Columbia climate majors, Schaefer notes that there are two other fast-growing fields: climate justice and climate communications. The first focuses on how climate change disproportionately impacts marginalized populations and looks to create climate solutions that don’t exacerbate current inequities. The communications focus looks to bridge the gap between climate scientists who are pressing for change and the politicians, industry leaders, and wider public who have the power to make it happen.

At Montana, where the causes and effects of climate change are tangible due to the occurrence of wildfires and unsustainable state energy policy, McDonough has seen a large increase in students interested in the mental health aspects of tackling the crisis.

“My first semester on the job, I had a student attempt suicide because climate change had become such a traumatic thing for her that she couldn’t picture a way forward anymore,” he says. “Thankfully she didn’t succeed and is now actually working in the field. But that lit a fire under me.”

Montana now offers an undergraduate honors class called Climate Change, Mental Health, and Resilience, and a graduate psychology course called Psychology and Climate Change. The mental health lens is also built into its compulsory introductory course.

Yet as schools move toward embracing the more psychological and ethical aspects of climate change, McDonough predicts some backlash from more conservative school administrators.

“The program is growing slowly . . . because we’re in a very red state that tries to quash any efforts to address climate change,” he says. “Our sister university, Montana State University, has actively demoted and fired faculty for teaching about climate change, and have forced PhD students to change their theses. . . . There’s a little bit of very understandable fear at the school administration level in states like Montana and Idaho and Wyoming.”

Despite this, McDonough remains optimistic.

“This generation of college students is so much more savvy about climate than my generation or previous generations ever were,” he says. “The momentum is clearly in favor of strong climate change programs.”