2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Education for Sustainable Development (EDS) has been an increasing concern and an urgent response to face environmental, social, and economical challenges worldwide. Due to the negative impact of human actions on the earth’s ecosystems that has driven global warming, ESD represents a prominent approach to address environmental, social, and economic issues to promote personal and societal transformations. Therefore, Higher Education Institutions play a pivotal role in educating the next generation of engineering leaders. Although the knowledge of sustainability differs among generations, the role of each generation in fostering sustainability is significant. More research is needed to evaluate and measure the impact of sustainability initiatives within curriculum. Hence, this paper aims to measure sustainability knowledge and analyze the intergenerational differences of sustainability knowledge between engineering students from generation Z and generation Y.
At present, generation Z is becoming the most dominant generation in terms of population. At present, Gen Z (born between 1993 and 2005) holds about 23.4% of the global population while Gen Y (born between 1977 and 1993), also known as Millennials, hold 28.6% of the world’s population. Understanding the cross-generational disparities between engineering students who are part of generation Z and generation Y helps educators to design better strategies to integrate sustainability into curriculum. Thus, the hypothesis proposed is generation Z students from engineering programs achieve higher sustainability knowledge scores than those generation Y students who are enrolled in engineering programs at the graduate level.
The sample comprises 94 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate engineering programs in Bogota, Colombia. This cross-sectional study utilized a standardized Sustainability Literacy Test (Sulitest). A t-test analysis was applied. The results show statistically significant differences of sustainability knowledge scores between engineering students, reporting generation Z (M=53.8, SD=5.01) scored higher than generation Y (M=44.3, SD=0.27, t (92) = -4.1964, p = .01374. The findings provide (a) meaningful insights to foster EDS, (b) a better understanding of measuring sustainability knowledge among engineering students from generation Z and generation Y, and (c) recommendations to incorporate sustainability curriculum development initiatives for future sustainable global engineering courses.