A US university has a new requirement to graduate: take a climate change course

UC San Diego has added an innovative prerequisite to ‘prepare students for the future they really will encounter’

Melani Callicott, a human biology major at the University of California, San Diego, thinks about the climate crisis all the time. She discusses it with family and friends because of the intensity of hurricanes like Milton and Helene, which have ravaged the southern US, she says. “It just seems like it’s affecting more people every day.”

That’s one reason why she is glad that UC San Diego has implemented an innovative graduation requirement for students starting this autumn: a course in climate change. Courses must cover at least 30% climate-related content and address two of four areas, including scientific foundations, human impacts, mitigation strategies and project-based learning. About 7,000 students from the class of 2028 will be affected this year.

“The most important thing is that UC San Diego wants to make sure we’re preparing students for the future that they really will encounter,” says Sarah Gille, a physical oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was part of the committee to create the new plan.

The requirement won’t add any time to a student’s graduation schedule – it’s designed to be integrated into existing classwork. Forty one-quarter courses meet the goal, including “The Astronomy of Climate Change”, “Gender and Climate Justice”, “Indigenous Approaches to Climate Change” and “Environmentalism in Arts and Media”. Many of the classes that fall under the climate requirement overlap with courses that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, the school says.

Gille says students are positive about the requirement, which aims to prepare them for future climate-related policies and career opportunities.

“We’re acutely aware as a society of how the climate is changing and how scary that can be, and that probably means that we need to implement some changes in how we do things,” says Gille. “If they’re thinking about the future, they need to be prepared for what the future might bring.” That could mean new opportunities in climate-adjacent fields such as carbon accounting or civil engineering with a climate focus.

Gille says she can stand in front of a class and talk about what the world might look like in 50 or 100 years in terms of temperature increase or sea level rise – “a pretty demoralizing lesson” – but when she ties it to strategic decisions students can make about their own lives, and how to pursue opportunities in the future, “it can become an empowering lesson too”.

The move mirrors a larger sentiment in society. According to a Marist poll this year, 85% of gen Z is very or somewhat concerned about the climate crisis. They are more likely to believe the climate crisis is caused “mostly by human activity” than any other generation. And states from California to Connecticut and New Jersey are now requiring that kids learn about the climate crisis in grade school classrooms.

Arizona State University has also implemented a new sustainability requirement for graduation this year. Universities such as Columbia, Harvard and Stanford are taking the climate focus a step further and have created entire schools devoted to the issue.

Marcello Ametrano, a communications major and marine science minor, says that even as a non-science student, he’s interested in keeping up to date on the latest science. “It’s really opening my eyes to a lot of what’s going on right now, especially with Hurricane Milton, and why it’s so devastating,” he says. Understanding the oceans is key: “The ocean is kind of saving us from it being so much worse, because it absorbs so much carbon dioxide. So it’s really important to understand the ocean because it directly relates to climate change and essentially what’s going on right now in Florida.”

A wider rollout of climate change courses for graduation is possible across the vast, statewide University of California system, but the school is first focusing on its own plan. “The important thing for UC San Diego was to do what made sense for our campus and to see how this requirement is adopted,” Gille says. “If we can do something that’s bigger, we can potentially create a generation of college graduates who are better prepared for the future.”

Cover photo: By The Guardian