02 Education for sustainability

Making sustainability an integral part of our education means teaching students to understand and value the links between economic, social and environmental developments. We want to prepare our students to tackle sustainability challenges in their future careers. The goal is that graduates of our university, the leaders of the future, understand the challenges that we should overcome for our society and environment. This is why our chosen objectives are to:

• embed the concepts of sustainability and transformation across our entire portfolio of academic disciplines (mainstreaming);
• make sure every student has a basic level of sustainability literacy;
• offer a wide range of minors, majors and specialisations with a sustainability focus.

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 2022.

EUR currently boasts 64 degree and non-degree programmes focused on sustainability, including honours programmes, professional programmes and open online courses (MOOCs). That means our educational offer has increased with almost 40% since 2021! The majority of these are minors within degree programmes. Our website provides an overview of educational programmes in sustainability. One of our full sustainability programmes is the master degree in Global Business and Sustainability at Rotterdam School of Management (RSM). Within three months of graduation, 89% of graduates are employed, finding work as sustainability consultants, sustainability managers or ESG financial analysts in major corporations, the public sector and the not-for-profit sector.

Several courses and programmes were newly introduced in 2022. 

Academics from several faculties developed the new transdisciplinary master Societal Transitions in collaboration with the Design Impact Transition (DIT) platform. Though students were already able to enrol in 2022, the first formal edition of the master programme will start in September 2023 and will be housed at the Erasmus School of Philosophy (ESPhil).

Erasmus MC, in collaboration with Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), has launched the master Medical Business and Innovation.

The LDE Bachelor Honours Programme Sustainability launched in November. Dr Wouter Spekkink from Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences (ESSB) is part of the teaching team.

Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) has published a series of 18 videos with teaching cases featuring SDG business cases. These videos are available online for free. RSM also offers Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with a focus on sustainability and the climate crisis.

Dr Ana Vasques (ESHCC) and Dr Yijing Wang (EUC) were awarded a CLI Fellowship, which helped them develop an interdisciplinary and intercultural honours course focused on sustainable development: Communicating Sustainability in an Intercultural Context.