STEM students’ views on sustainability

Abstract

Most research on STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) higher education focuses on high attrition rates and the underrepresentation of women in these disciplines, but only a few deal with the values of STEM students. The main goal of this research was to explore STEM students’ values about ecological sustainability and materialism because the values of future professionals responsible for creating and applying technological innovation can have a global and long-term impact. During our research, we analysed a database consisting of data of the students of 17 Hungarian universities with a sample size of 7174. In our analysis, we focused on the differences in students’ values based on their field of study and gender. According to our results, the sustainability and materialistic values of students are mainly connected to the prestige of their studies, and the attitudes toward sustainability of students studying engineering, technology, economics, and law were shown to be the least favourable. Results on gender differences however paint a more nuanced picture: even though in most fields women tend to value sustainability as more important than men and materialistic values as less important, this difference is more pronounced in STEM fields. Based on our results, exploring how higher education socialization and reflexion on sustainability in the curriculum in different fields can explain the differences observed in students’ values can be an important and fruitful research topic.