Massachusetts Institute of Technology
AC-1: Academic Courses

The full inventory of “active” undergraduate and graduate classes – those classes that are “on the books” as of October 2017 – was reviewed. The first step was to flag classes whose titles indicted environmental content. The second step was to review class descriptions for all the environmental classes to identify those classes that were oriented toward sustainability: that is, would a student taking this class necessarily be engaged in learning why and how to help society pursue pathways toward a future that was both environmentally and socially sustainable? This approach to identifying classes that include or focus on sustainability resulted in a narrower set of classes than would be the case if we had followed the “two out of three” Earth Charter criteria approach (environment, society, economics). Three critical topic areas that meet the “sustainability orientation” criterion above but are primarily focused on environment were also included in this analysis; these topic areas are climate, sustainable energy (renewable/alternative sources, storage, efficiency), and ecology. Descriptions for all courses offered by MIT are available at http://student.mit.edu/catalog/index.cgi.

Multiple offerings were not counted. If a class had both undergraduate and graduate sections, only one section was counted based on whether the official registrars list identified the "master" section as undergraduate of graduate.