University of California, Berkeley
AC-1: Academic Courses

An undergraduate student fellow at the Office of Sustainability specifically chosen to work on the STARS v2.2 report created a list of keywords to identify sustainability course offerings. The keyword search included keywords related to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), sustainability-focused keywords, and sustainability-inclusive keywords. The SDG keywords were largely drawn from research completed by the University of Toronto students, titled “Expanding Student Engagement in Sustainability: Using SDG- and CEL-Focused Inventories to Transform Curriculum at the University of Toronto.” Their research report outlined the methodology of choosing keywords related to each of the UN SDGs. For the STARS report, the student fellow identified sustainability-focused and -inclusive keywords from the language of sustainability reports, practices, and academic departments.

After a large keyword search of the entire course catalogue for AY 2017-18 to 2019-20, the fellow then reviewed the identified course offerings to screen the accuracy of the keyword search and assigned courses as either sustainability-focused or -inclusive (for the courses containing keywords that matched both categories).

Graduate courses are those numbered 200 and above. Some courses were offered in undergraduate and graduate versions.

“Focused”: a course that views topics through the lens of sustainability. This does not mean that the word “sustainability” needs to be in the course description, it simply means that the topics of the course almost exclusively pertain to the definition of sustainability from above.

“Inclusive”: a course that devotes at least one unit or section to a sustainability topic or has direct applications in sustainability fields.

Note: Undergraduate and graduate versions of a course were counted separately.

The information from this field was collected via a manual search of the UC Berkeley course inventory over the past three school years filtering for items that qualified as sustainability-focused or sustainability-related courses. The resulting courses were then analyzed by the school's Office of Planning and Analysis to calculate the percentage of total courses that qualified as sustainable. The OPA also calculated the number of departments offering such sustainability courses.

The Office of Planning and Analysis (OPA) is UC Berkeley's central institutional research unit. The OPA supports data-informed decision making to help UC Berkeley better fulfill its goals of access and excellence through teaching, research, and public service.