On a Thursday this fall, hundreds of students at the University of California, San Diego, were heading to classes that, at least on paper, seemed to have very little to do with their majors.
Hannah Jenny, an economics and math major, was on their way to a class on sustainable development. Angelica Pulido, a history major who aspires to work in the museum world, was getting ready for a course on gender and climate justice. Later that evening, others would show up for a lecture on economics of the environment, where they would learn how to calculate the answer to questions such as: “How many cents extra per gallon of gas are people willing to pay to protect seals from oil spills?”
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Although most of these students don’t aspire to careers in climate science or advocacy, the university is betting that it’s just as important for them to understand the science and societal implications of climate change as it is for them to understand literature and history, even if they’re not planning to become writers or historians. UCSD is perhaps the first major public university in the country to require all undergraduate students to take a class on climate change to earn their degree.
The requirement, which rolled out with first-year students last fall, came about because UCSD leaders believe students won’t be prepared for the workforce if they don’t understand climate change. Around the globe, global warming is already causing severe droughts, water scarcity, fires, rising sea levels, flooding, storms and declining biodiversity; leaders at UCSD argue every job will be affected.
And even as President Donald Trump dismisses climate change as a hoax and cancels funding for research on it, other colleges are also exploring how to ensure students are knowledgeable about the subject. Arizona State University began requiring that students take a class in sustainability last year, while San Francisco State University added a climate justice class requirement to begin this fall.
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“You can’t avoid climate change,” said Amy Lerner, a professor in the urban planning department at UCSD. “You can’t escape it in the private sector. You can’t escape it in the public sector. It’s just everywhere.” Students, she said, must be made ready to engage with all of its likely consequences.
UCSD, a public university that serves roughly 35,000 undergraduate students, is not demanding that everyone sign up for Climate Change 101. Instead, students can fulfill the requirement by taking any of more than 50 classes in at least 23 disciplines across the university, including sustainable development, the course Jenny is taking.
There’s also psychology of the climate crisis, religion and ecology, energy economics, and several classes in the environmental science and oceanography departments, among others. And leaders at the university are working to develop more classes that satisfy the requirement, including one on the life cycle of a computer.
Bryan Alexander, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and author of a book on higher education and the climate crisis, said that while colleges have long taught about climate change in classes related to ecology, climatology and environmental science, it’s only been in the last decade or so that he’s seen other disciplines tackle the topic.
Climate change, Alexander said, “is the new liberal arts” — and colleges should take it seriously.
K. Wayne Yang, a UCSD provost who served on the original group that advocated for the requirement, said every industry and career field will experience the effects of climate change in some way. Health care providers need to know how to treat people who have been exposed to extreme heat or wildfire smoke; psychologists need to understand climate anxiety; and café owners need to know how the price of coffee changes in response to droughts or other natural disasters in coffee-growing regions.
Jenny, the senior taking a class on sustainable development, is eager to get answers to a question that has, in their three years as an economics and mathematics major, become difficult not to ponder: How can economic growth be the silver bullet of societal change if it has so many negative consequences for the planet?
“It’s definitely my hope that this is a class that will teach me something new about how to consider humanity’s path forward without destroying this earth, without destroying each other, without sacrificing quality of life for any person on this planet,” Jenny said.
Jenny isn’t subject to the requirement because they entered college before it rolled out. But they said they like the idea of encouraging students to step outside their comfort zones and fields of study and, in many cases, consider their future career paths in the context of the changing climate.
Other students, like junior Pulido, don’t see a specific link between climate change and their future careers. Pulido, who has spent the last few years working in the visitors center at San Diego’s Balboa Park and aspires to work in museums, said she signed up for the gender and climate justice class simply because it sounded interesting to her. She believes climate change is important, and she’s hoping that taking this class will help give her a better idea of how its role in history and might play into her career.
Colleges are taking different approaches to teaching their students about climate change, with some requiring a course in sustainability, a broad discipline that goes beyond the specific scientific phenomenon of climate change.
At Arizona State, sustainability classes can cover anything about how human, social, economic, political and cultural choices affect human and environmental well-being generally, said Anne Jones, the university’s vice provost for undergraduate education.
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Dickinson and Goucher colleges have had such requirements since 2015 and 2007, respectively.
At San Francisco State University, leaders said they instead chose to require climate justice for all students, beginning with the class of 2029, because of the urgency of understanding how climate change affects communities differently.
Students need to understand broader systems of oppression and privilege so that they can address the unequal effects of climate change for “communities of color, low-income communities, global south communities and other marginalized communities,” said Autumn Thoyre, co-director of Climate HQ, the university’s center for climate education, research and action.
Yang and other UCSD leaders believe that, despite the increased politicization of climate change under Trump, they’ve received little pushback on the new requirement because of the university’s reputation as a climate-concerned institution. (It descended from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, initially founded in 1903.) But this model may not work as well on other campuses.
In communities where people’s livelihoods depend on activities that contribute to climate change, like coal mining or oil production, educators may have to modify their approach so as to not come off as offensive or threatening, said Jo Tavares, director of the California Center for Climate Change Education at West Los Angeles College.
“Messaging is so important, and education cannot be done in a way that just forces facts upon people,” Tavares said.
At UCSD, to meet the graduation requirement, a course must be at least 30 percent about climate change: For example, a class that meets twice a week for a 10-week term must have at least six of its 20 sessions be about climate change. And the course syllabus must address at least two of the following four categories: the scientific aspects; human and social dimensions; project-based learning; or solutions.
The first time Lerner, the urban studies professor, applied for her sustainable development course to count toward the requirement, in July 2024, the committee told her she needed to better explain how the class addressed climate change. It wasn’t enough to simply have “sustainable” in the course name, committee members told her; she had to better articulate the role of climate change in sustainable development, a course she’s been teaching some version of for nearly 20 years.
Her students helped her go through the syllabus and identify all the points where she was teaching about how development contributes to climate change, even if she wasn’t explicitly putting those words to paper. After Lerner revised the descriptions of the class topics and made a few additions, the class was approved, she said.
On that fall Thursday, Lerner walked around her large glass-walled classroom while discussing development and globalization with the 65 undergraduate students in her sustainable development class. They covered how to balance equity, economy and environment in development, as well as various ways to measure the well-being of societies, including gross national income, food security, birthrate and infant mortality, happiness, fertility, education and lifespan. Lerner peppered her lecture with jokes and relatable examples, asking, for example, how many siblings students had before explaining the role of fertility and birth rate in a healthy society. (One student had 12, but the average was closer to two.)
Lerner, who now chairs the committee that decides which classes meet the requirement, said most of her students come in with the understanding that climate change is caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, and some have even used an online tool to calculate their own carbon footprints. Often, their education has been focused on the hard science aspect of climate change, but they haven’t learned about what society has experienced as a result of climate change, she said.
When she asks them what can be done about climate change, she said, “they’re deer in the headlights.”
Across campus, economics professor Mark Jacobsen teaches a lecture class every Thursday night on the economics of the environment. It meets the climate change requirement, but it also covers a core economics idea, he said: achieving efficiency.
Jacobsen is teaching students the formulas and methods they’ll need to answer questions like whether it’s worth it to spend $1 billion now to build renewable energy sources to avoid $10 billion in natural disaster cleanup in 30 years.
Though Jenny hasn’t taken Jacobsen’s class, this is exactly the type of dilemma they’re worried about.
Jenny, a public transit enthusiast so dedicated that they got a commercial driver’s license just to drive for Triton Transit, the campus bus system, said the requirement encourages students to face the climate crisis rather than shy away from it.
“It can be easy to kind of put your head down and be like, ‘That is too big for me to think about, and too scary,’” Jenny said. But it’s imperative, they added, that students be “forced to reckon with it and think about it and talk about it, to have that knowledge kind of swirling around in your head.”
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Olivia Sanchez, Hechinger Report grist.org
