02 Education for sustainability

What do we mean by sustainability in education? At EUR, it means teaching students to pay attention to the links between economic, social, and environmental developments. We want to prepare our students to tackle sustainability challenges in their future careers. This is why we’ve chosen to embed the concepts of sustainability and transformation across our entire portfolio of academic disciplines. But the story does not end there, as students and faculty staff alike will need the university’s support in ensuring the new educational reality feels welcome, self-evident and easy to operate within, and said support must also reflect our values.

In this chapter, we present a broad overview of the current sustainability-related courses and degree programmes offered at EUR, as well as several notable highlights of our achievements in 2021. Lastly, we look ahead to what’s on the horizon in 2022.

EUR currently boasts 42 degree and non-degree programmes focused on sustainability (see Graph below), including a combined total of 11 honours programmes, professional programmes and open online courses (MOOCs). The majority of these consist of minors within degree programmes. A complete overview can be found in the minor, master’s, and bachelor’s catalogues. The four educational programmes focused specifically on sustainability are the academic major in Sustainability at Erasmus University College (EUC), the bachelor’s degree in Management of International Social Challenges at ESSB, the master’s degree in Development Studies at the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS), and the master’s degree in Global Business and Sustainability at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) . To our delight, the last of these has been rated the best master’s degree of its kind anywhere in the world since 2019, and its annual intake grew from 30 students in 2011 to almost 200 in 2021. More than 90% of its graduates are employed within 6 months of graduation, finding work as sustainability consultants, sustainability managers or ESG financial analysts in major corporations, the public sector and in the not-for-profit sector.

In 2021, the Erasmus School of Law (ESL) claimed the honour of becoming the first EUR school to begin integrating sustainability into its academic programmes (Law, Tax Law and Criminology), the results of which were presented in the first Sustainability in Education Report to be published by an EUR school. The school began by establishing a working group tasked with assessing the current situation and making recommendations, which in the report included several avenues for advancing sustainability at subject, degree and faculty level, with an emphasis on making existing initiatives more explicit and encouraging collaborating both within ESL and between the school and other faculties. You can find an overview of these initiatives and their links to specific SDGs in the report.

November saw the launch of the Design Impact Transition (DIT) Platform, whose mission is to empower people to pursue radically new methods for conducting research, providing education and stimulating engagement in efforts to bring about a just and sustainable future. The platform provides a space for academics, students and societal stakeholders to actively contribute to a sustainable society by gaining relevant skills and transdisciplinary knowledge. To this end, DIT is currently developing a master’s degree in sustainability in collaboration with the Erasmus School of Philosophy (ESPhil), which will be offered from the start of the 2023/24 academic year.

The year also saw the Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management (ESHPM) exploring a whole range of ways to integrate sustainability into its courses, out of which came concrete plans to add the subject of the sustainability of hospitals to its Health Care Management curriculum. ESHPM was also part of a working group called “Greener Healthcare Education”, which was the source of the advice to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science to establish a group of experts and teachers from various universities and disciplines and task it with developing a range of educational materials for common use. The working group held its first conference on sustainability in health education last December, which you can view here.

In the pipeline for 2022 are a sustainability dashboard and a strategy monitor. Preparations for relevant KPIs for Sustainability in Education are also in full swing, and you can expect the first versions of these in summer 2022. Once we have them, we’ll be able to monitor our progress on sustainability, alongside our other strategic efforts.

A new teaching tool and set of guidelines will be rolled out this year to help EUR professors provide students with sustainability-related competencies as part of their degrees. These competencies consist of sets of knowledge, skills and attitudes crucial to understanding and dealing with the complex challenges facing society. We derived the competencies from the United Nation’s learning objectives to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. What might these new teaching methods entail, you ask? Well, check out one from the toolbox called the “Iceberg”, developed for the honours course in Sustainability in an Intercultural Context. This particular method encourages students to map visible events relating to a sustainability problem and identify patterns, structures and attitudes hidden beneath the surface of said event.

Pinar Coskun, project manager of the Erasmus Food Lab, is familiar to both students and staff as a regular source of advice on sustainable diets. So you’ll be delighted to learn that from May 2022, she will be teaming up with Sergio Mugnai of Erasmus University College, to offer an elective called Sustainable and Equitable Food Strategies. Any initial doubts as to the level of interest in the subject were quickly dispelled by the sheer number of applicants for the course, which far exceeded the number of available spots.

From the 2022/23 academic year onwards, EUR will offer two new master’s degree specializations with strong links to sustainability. Students interested in understanding how economics can contribute to better policies for sustainable development will be able to take an MSc in the Economics of Sustainability, as developed by ESE. And anyone wishing to combine their background in healthcare and life sciences with business will be able to take an MSc in Medical Business and Innovation at the RSM, which will be offered in collaboration with Erasmus MC. Developments such as these are a testament to our commitment to making sustainability an integral part of our academic offering, which is one of the university’s strategic goals, and our efforts to achieving said goals are very much set to continue in the years ahead.

We have every confidence that over the course of the coming academic year, other EUR schools will take a leaf out of ESL’s book and begin developing concrete steps to embed sustainability in their own curricula.