Predicting engineering students’ desire to address climate change in their careers: an exploratory study using responses from a U.S. National survey

Abstract

More engineering students are needed to address climate change in their careers. These students are necessary because engineering includes designing and building machines, structures, and components that contribute large portions of society’s carbon emissions. We surveyed a national sample of undergraduate engineering students (n = 4605) in their last semester of college about their desire to address climate change in their careers and the factors that predicted these responses. Possible variables for wanting to address climate change in their career included course topics, co-curricular experiences, climate knowledge, political affiliation, religion, and other demographics. The strongest factors that predicted engineering students’ desire to address climate change in their career were related to a feeling of personal responsibility to deal with environmental problems, recognizing climate change as a technical (not social) issue, believing climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels and livestock production, and their engineering discipline. Students majoring in environmental and architectural engineering were more likely to want to address climate change in their careers than others. Previous known factors to increase motivation for climate action like course topics, political affiliation, student organization participation, undergraduate research experience, and environmental volunteering were not strong predictors among engineering undergraduate students.

Keywords:

• Engineering
• national survey
• climate change
• environmental education
• higher education

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the students who participated in the research by completing the survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 1635534 and 1635204. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.