Assessing sustainability in university curricula: exploring the influence of student numbers and course credits

Abstract

As more universities become interested in, and engaged with, sustainability, there has been a growing need to assess how their curricula addresses sustainable development and its myriad issues. Different tools and assessment exercises have looked at course descriptors; however, the influence of the number of students enrolled on courses, or the relative weight in credits of the courses in respect of the degrees, has not been explored. The paper compares, with the help of t-tests, three hypotheses developed to investigate the effect of these two influences. The analysis was done using the results from an updated version of the Sustainability Tool for Assessing UNiversities' Curricula Holistically (STAUNCH®) for the Bachelor and Master programmes from the Faculty of Business and the Faculty of Environment of the University of Leeds. The analysis shows that the results are not statistically dissimilar. Nonetheless, the curricula assessment (including the number of students enrolled and the number of credits) can help to better understand where the university's courses and programmes are, and how they could be changed to become more sustainability oriented, and, ultimately, to have the greatest impact to help make societies more sustainable.