Originally Posted August 31, 2023
Last week, I took part in Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum thought exercise about Solarpunk campuses. There was a lot of discussion about how to redesign campuses to be more efficient and to limit carbon emissions. The discussion centered on how to make those campuses antifragile[1] [2] , and more resistant to the severe weather events that will be more common under climate change.
However, campuses don’t live in a vacuum and, while they need to be concerned about their carbon emissions, the impact that institutional policies and practices have on the carbon emissions of their students, employees[3] [4] , and the larger community are perhaps even more significant than internal efforts to “go green.”
I have been arguing for years that we need to look more critically at our systems of learning for pedagogical and technological reasons. However, there is a strong carbon emissions benefit to doing this as well.
NetZero building construction is a laudable goal. However, this approach won’t radically alter the carbon footprint of a campus because so much of the built infrastructure is decades old. Almost 70% of buildings on a typical campus are over 10 years old.
Institutions could retrofit some buildings to make them more efficient, but the idea of wholesale campus rebuilds is outside the conception of most cash-strapped institutions. Instead, budgetary pressures often motivate colleges to focus on challenges presented by congestion and parking. These are cost drivers because they eat up valuable land and reduce enrollment as potential students reason that it’s hard to get to campus.
Some colleges have attempted to restrict cars on campus or access to campus parking resources for this reason alone. However, by doing this, they are shifting the burden of carbon mitigation onto the individual student or employee who face economic barriers over which they have little control.
These kinds of policies shift responsibility away from institutional drivers of carbon emissions. Institutional inflexibility forces too many students and employees to travel to and from campuses far too often.
Around 85% of all college students are commuter students. Their collective impact on carbon emissions is significant. We can eliminate a lot of those planetary costs if we rethink how our industrial-based systems of education work to drive transportation costs.
Educational systems are not immutable. The pandemic proved just how much flexibility was possible during an extreme event.
Climate change is a slow rolling version of Covid. Like the pandemic, it is up to institutions, from government to business to education, to create the conditions necessary for individuals to adapt to flexible, remote modalities of work and learning.
Cal Polytechnic did an experiment [5] [6] [7] on the eve of the pandemic to reduce the number of students driving to the campus every day. They found that by banning freshman parking they reduced the number of students driving to campus by a considerable margin, at least at first. Unfortunately, they also discovered a backlash effect as sophomores and up drove even more.
When they reduced restrictions, freshmen drove more than well, resulting in a net increase in miles driven by students to reach the institution. Coupled with the expensive California housing market, students had to drive more and drive further to reach affordable housing.
Neither students nor institutions can control the macroeconomic factors that drive off-campus housing costs. Institutions can impact the burdens those realities impose on their students (and employees).
College’s attempted to restrict parking is an example of putting the burden of change on the individual. The system rewrote the rules that were easiest to rewrite. A captive student population has little choice but to go along with that decision.
The average car in the United States emits 4.6 metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere every year, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. This translates into around 400 g of CO2 per mile driven.
In 2020, the Cal Poly students in their study drove almost 7 miles per student or 14 miles per trip. That’s 5.6 kg per student per day going to campus.
Sixty percent of Cal Poly students commute to campus, according to US News and World Report. That means 13,200 students drive 14 miles every day on average. Every day the college forces those 13,200 students to commute to campus puts 74,000 kg of CO2 into the air.
If institutions converted classes to hybrid or blended learning, they could cut these emissions in half or more. Again, a little math.
If we assume a typical class meets twice a week during a regular academic 16-week term, and four times a week for 10 weeks in the summer, this saves 42 student trips to campus. 42 trips X 5.6 kg X 13,200 students means that doing this conversion results in over 3000 metric tons of CO2 saved from Cal Poly’s carbon ledger.
Imagine the carbon savings when you extend this line of thinking to the millions of commuter students in the US alone. Cal Poly is just one institution and far from the worst. The community college where I teach has almost five times the number of commuter students and probably similar average commute distances.
There are other direct benefits from this one policy shift. Institutions could reduce building utilization. The resultant savings in heating and electricity would save millions and cut carbon emissions.
Campuses could be strategic and shut down the least efficient buildings first, achieving an even greater net gain to their carbon balance sheets. This would also reduce pressures on room assignments and overcrowding in classrooms for those institutions that have that problem.
I outlined how we could reconstruct and reconfigure campuses to support hybrid learning last year in my blog “Classrooms of the Mind.” This is education without compromise. It leverages technology, where appropriate, to augment more targeted and substantial face-to-face interactions than is the current practice.
Sometimes, 100% online classes are appropriate, especially for more advanced learners. However, the over 50% of American students that attend community colleges and a significant chunk of students who attend four-year institutions require a lot of instruction on how to learn to be effective students. This requires a high degree of personalized attention, much of which benefits from face-to-face interactions.
Physical campuses still have a role. There is something to be said for the spontaneity of putting groups of people in a room together to explore ideas and information, but this does not happen in the same manner for every class session in most classes.
Educating our students in this manner also prepares them for hybrid or remote work environments, which are increasingly common and have similar carbon benefits. Schools must prepare students to succeed in all technological modalities. Forcing them to learn based on industrial modalities does not do this.
We can create systemic environments that limit carbon outcomes. Coupled with efforts to make existing infrastructure more carbon neutral, these can have a multiplier effect on how we address carbon change.
We should not ignore the elephant in the room because human systems “have always worked that way.“ This is a fallacy. Most of the systems we work under are only 100 to 150 years old, if that. We developed them to satisfy industrial norms.
It is these norms that gave us climate change. It’s high time we shifted our paradigms to meet new technological realities of working and learning. Doing so will also contribute to mitigating the effects of the Anthropocene and result in a more diverse, accessible, and quality educational experience for our students.
Thank you to Bryan Alexander for contributing his reactions to this blog