Stanford University
AC-1: Academic Courses

All courses offered in the 2021 calendar year were perused and sorted by title and course description into the categories of “Sustainability-Focused,” “Sustainability-Inclusive,” and courses unrelated to sustainability. Each course was critically evaluated on its relationship to the multidimensional goal of promoting sustainability on both local and global levels. The definition of “sustainability” used when identifying courses was as follows: having a focus on and concern for the healthy maintenance and development of society environmentally, economically, and socially.

The course descriptions were an important factor of classification; if sustainability was a primary focus of the course, such as the "Mitigating Climate Change" course, that course was listed as “Sustainability Focused.” Courses that have a strong social and/or economic sustainability component but not an environmental component, such as Stanford's "Black Political Struggle," were listed as “Sustainability-Inclusive."

Staff obtained a list of all courses offered in 2021 from Stanford’s Institutional Research and Decision Support (IR&DS). In the totals above, one course is counted as any course offered during a single term within a single department.

If a course was offered in multiple quarters, each of those offerings was counted as a single course. For instance, if a course was offered in both Autumn quarter and Spring quarter in 2021, it was counted as two separate courses.

Similarly, unique Course IDs from the IR&DS dataset were analyzed to develop the course counts. As a result, cross-listed courses that fall within multiple departments may be listed more than once in the dataset that was uploaded to support this credit. This methodology was applied when considering both the numerator and denominator metrics reported.

Staff also used column data from the IR&DS dataset to remove the following types of classes: internships; practicums; independent study; thesis/dissertations; special topics; physical education; performance art classes; clinical; and enrollment of four or fewer. The rationale behind removing many of these course types is that they are quite dependent on the interests of the student, so it is difficult to determine their exact content.

Finally, undergraduate vs. graduate courses are identified using column data provided in the raw IR&DS dataset. If the course had a "Class Acad Career Code" of "UG", it was marked as 'undergraduate.' All other course codes were marked as ‘graduate.’ However, at Stanford, there is significant overlap between undergraduate and graduate enrollment in many courses.

This detailed analytic process was performed very carefully in order to ensure utmost accuracy. Based on this thorough process, Stanford feels confident that it generated the most accurate and complete list possible of sustainability courses at the university.

The number of "Departments" listed for this credit will be higher than the number of departments in the 2019 submission since a more refined department list was able to be obtained from a recent Academic Courses dataset provided by IR&DS. This more recent dataset includes many sub-departments and interdisciplinary programs in its list of "Departments."