Is STEM education failing our students, our planet or both?

STEM graduates will be expected to help solve the climate crisis. But are universities giving them the education they need to understand it?

Climate change is often presented as a problem for science, engineering and technology to solve. Better energy systems, cleaner transport, new materials and more efficient technologies will all matter. But none of these solutions exists outside politics, economics, culture or society. Decisions about what gets built, who benefits, who bears the costs and which problems receive attention are never purely technical.

That creates a challenge for STEM education. Students can graduate with strong technical expertise while having had relatively little opportunity to examine the social, political, historical and psychological dimensions of the problems they are expected to address. A UIIN Insights Brief by Déspina Kortesidou and Madeline Arkins explores how integrating social sciences and humanities into STEM education can help close that gap, with a particular focus on systems thinking, critical reflection and transdisciplinary learning.

The climate crisis is not a technical problem alone

The way we educate students reflects assumptions about the kinds of problems they will encounter. STEM disciplines are particularly effective at teaching students to analyse defined problems, apply specialist knowledge and design technical solutions. The difficulty is that many sustainability challenges are not defined problems at all.

Climate change is entangled with patterns of consumption, economic growth, political power, public institutions, inequality and historical choices. Solutions that make sense from one perspective can create consequences somewhere else. A technically efficient intervention may be socially unacceptable. A low-carbon technology may depend on extractive supply chains. A solution designed without affected communities may solve the problem its designers identified while creating new ones for the people expected to live with it.

That is why technical knowledge needs to be accompanied by the ability to ask different kinds of questions. Not only what can we do? and how can we do it?, but also why should we do it, when, for whom and with what consequences?

Social sciences and humanities are particularly important here because they put questions of power, justice, institutions, human behaviour and historical responsibility into the discussion. STEM students exposed to these perspectives can begin to see sustainability not as a series of isolated technical challenges but as a network of interacting human and ecological systems.

There is also a human dimension to this gap. Students learning about climate breakdown are not processing information in an emotional vacuum. Environmental knowledge can create cognitive dissonance between what people believe and how they behave. It can also bring grief, anxiety and a destabilising recognition that some assumptions about progress, growth and the future may no longer hold. Yet these responses are rarely part of the formal STEM curriculum.

The problem is reinforced when social sciences and humanities appear only as peripheral or introductory subjects. Students quickly learn what their institution regards as core knowledge and what it regards as supplementary. If ethical, political and social questions sit at the margins of a technical degree, graduates may enter professional life well prepared to apply their expertise but less prepared to question its limits.

What should climate-ready STEM education include?

A more complete approach would not replace technical education with social science. It would connect them.

Four areas are particularly useful for doing this.

1. Planetary boundaries give students a clearer understanding of the ecological systems within which innovation takes place. Rather than treating environmental constraints as externalities to be managed later, students can examine finite resources, feedback loops and the relationships between ecological change and human wellbeing. This encourages them to consider the wider consequences of proposed solutions, including unintended effects on people and ecosystems.
2. Sociology and history provide a way to understand how environmental problems are shaped by institutions, power and path dependency. Students can investigate whose interests have influenced policy choices, why particular economic models became dominant and whose knowledge is included or excluded when solutions are designed. These are not abstract additions to sustainability education. They affect what societies define as a problem in the first place.
3. Psychology and emotional intelligence help students make sense of their own responses to environmental crisis. Reflection can expose cognitive dissonance and bias, while dialogue can help students move beyond guilt or paralysis towards a stronger sense of agency. Climate education asks students to think seriously about difficult futures; giving them tools to process that experience is part of preparing them to act within it.
4. Finally, foresight and futures bring a longer-term perspective into technical decision-making. Scenario planning, design methods and other anticipatory tools can help students explore different possible futures rather than assuming a single technological trajectory. They can also ask how affected communities would define success, whether interventions have been genuinely co-designed, and whether today’s innovations reinforce existing systems or create pathways towards something different.

Together, these perspectives give students something that technical specialisation alone struggles to provide: a way to understand the context in which their expertise operates.

Integration needs to happen gradually

Adding a sociology course to an engineering degree does not automatically produce transdisciplinary thinkers. Students need time to learn how different forms of knowledge relate to one another — and how to work productively when those perspectives conflict.

A useful starting point is multidisciplinary learning. Students remain grounded in their own discipline while gaining exposure to others. The objective is not yet to integrate everything, but to recognise that different fields see different parts of the same problem and that every discipline has limitations as well as strengths.

From there, students can move towards interdisciplinary learning, where those perspectives begin to interact. This is more demanding because disagreement becomes part of the learning process. An engineer, economist, sociologist and ecologist may define the same sustainability problem differently or prioritise different outcomes. Students therefore need to learn how to work through conflicts between efficiency, equity and ecological limits rather than treating disciplinary disagreement as an obstacle to be removed.

The final step is transdisciplinary learning, where the boundary around the university itself begins to open. Students work on complex problems alongside communities, civil society organisations, NGOs and other external partners, recognising that relevant knowledge does not sit exclusively inside academic disciplines. These partners become participants in defining the problem and shaping possible responses, rather than simply audiences for solutions developed elsewhere.

This progression matters because systems thinking is not something students acquire from a single module. It develops through repeated practice: seeing connections, encountering conflicting perspectives, reflecting on trade-offs and eventually applying those skills in situations where there is no single correct answer.

What this can look like inside a university

There are already useful examples of how these principles can be embedded without rebuilding an entire institution from scratch.

At Erasmus University Rotterdam, Experimental Pedagogics offers a flexible model across five dimensions of learning: cognitive, individual, group, social and global. The approach is deliberately adaptable, allowing educators to retrofit existing courses rather than requiring a completely linear curriculum redesign. It also recognises that learning for an uncertain future needs to engage students emotionally and socially, not just cognitively.

Aalborg University offers a different route. Its Problem-Based Learning tradition provides a foundation for progressively connecting disciplines as students move through their degrees. Early bachelor students can begin with multidisciplinary exposure, later bachelor students work more explicitly across disciplines, and master’s students move towards transdisciplinary projects involving knowledge from outside academia.

Teaching methods matter as much as curriculum structure. Guided reflection, for example, can help students connect their own reactions and assumptions to wider social and environmental systems. One pilot discussed in the publication found that, with appropriate scaffolding, a third of participating students progressed to more complex forms of reflection.

Collaborative methods can develop a different set of capacities. In a jigsaw problem-based learning exercise, students become responsible for different dimensions of a shared problem — ecological, economic, political or social, for example — before returning to their group to combine what they have learned. Instead of one student doing all the technical analysis while another writes the presentation, each participant holds knowledge the group needs. The structure creates both individual accountability and genuine interdependence.

None of this requires universities to abandon disciplinary expertise. The objective is to make that expertise more useful by helping students understand where it fits within a larger system.

Five shifts universities can start making

For educators and curriculum leaders, the implications are relatively concrete.

First, social, political and ethical perspectives need to move closer to the core of STEM programmes rather than sitting at the edges as optional or introductory material. Second, integration should be scaffolded over time: students need to progress from exposure to other disciplines towards genuine collaboration and ultimately towards work with non-academic stakeholders.

Project design also matters. Abstract classroom problems can be replaced, where possible, with challenges involving external actors such as NGOs, communities or policy organisations. That creates opportunities for students to see how apparently straightforward technical choices become more complicated once different interests and forms of knowledge enter the room.

Assessment needs to evolve alongside the curriculum. If universities want students to think systemically and collaborate across disciplines, they need ways of assessing those capabilities rather than relying only on measures of individual technical performance.

Finally, this cannot depend entirely on a handful of enthusiastic lecturers. Faculty themselves need opportunities to develop transdisciplinary facilitation skills and to share practice across departments. Communities of practice can help make curriculum development continuous rather than dependent on temporary projects or individual champions.

The wider argument is simple. The climate crisis will require scientists, engineers and technologists with deep expertise. But expertise becomes more powerful when graduates can also recognise systems, understand conflicting perspectives, work across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and question the assumptions behind the solutions they design.

This is not an argument for less STEM. It is an argument for a more complete STEM education — one that prepares students not only to build solutions, but to understand the world into which those solutions will be introduced.

Download the full UIIN brief for the complete framework, guiding questions for educators, pedagogical approaches, institutional examples and recommendations for putting SSH-STEM integration into practice.

Ready for more?

In this brief, we call for rethinking STEM education to equip students with the skills and perspectives needed to navigate today’s interconnected crises. A complementary example can be found at Utrecht University’s Urban Futures Studio, where researchers, students, and citizens collaborate to imagine just and sustainable futures through creativity, dialogue and experimental learning. Learn more about this in our article What Urban Futures Studio teaches us about the civic role of universities.

Déspina Kortesidou (author) is a Senior Consultant at UIIN.
Madeline Arkins (author) is a Project Officer at UIIN.