Purpose of the Sustainability Minor

I am reevaluating my feelings about the sustainability minor and its purpose.

On the one hand, in general, I want students to understand that solutions are not going to be purely technical. Solutions will need to work for the environment, economy, and social equality. So when we do research and engineering, we need to be more thoughtful about the kinds of applications we work on.

However, in order to make a transition to a sustainable society, every profession needs to change and so it's really important to have technical classes within every major so that no matter what engineering field you go into, there is an opportunity to gain relevant and employable skills related to aspects of the industry working on sustainability.

The current proposal of the minor offers 4 core classes outside of an engineering major: ecology, urban planning, market forces and government policy, and impact of environmental degradation on health. While I think these classes are really important for a basic understanding of sustainability issues and great that they'll be offered, I am worried that they're not relevant enough to people's own professions. Many engineering students may feel that while it's interesting, the minor does not actually give them any skills that allow them to be employable in sustainability related jobs. Then I doubt many engineering students would do the minor, and I was originally hoping for a minor to be appealing to as many people as possible since really, I think everyone should be getting a sustainability minor.

It may be, though, that the background overview information is more important and must precede the technical classes. Also, perhaps it's not important for it to appeal to every student. It may be more important right now to appeal to some students and generate interest and leave the departments themselves to add technical classes to prepare students for the economy and future job market.