Commitment to environmental sustainability in the UK student population

Sustainability is an increasingly important issue in higher education, both in the UK and internationally. Although environmental sustainability is the most frequently identified of the three pillars of sustainability (social and economic sustainability being less widely understood), there has been little previous research which has quantitatively explored the relationship between university attendance and commitment to environmental sustainability. This article presents the results of an analysis of data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), which compared young adults at UK universities with other respondents of a similar age in order to explore this relationship. Commitment to environmental sustainability was measured on a scale developed from seven questionnaire items used in BHPS Wave 18, and the relationship between university attendance and subsequent scale scores was examined. Results show that university attendance has a significant positive association with commitment to environmental sustainability over other adult transition pathways, including participation in other forms of full-time education, when gender and social class are taken into account and when prior educational attainment is held constant. Thus, we argue that UK universities may have a desirable impact on environmental commitment, and we explore possible explanations for our findings.