Student profiles on sustainability in interdisciplinary engineering education: European insights into motivation, abilities, and learning contexts

Student profiles on sustainability remain underdeveloped, particularly in interdisciplinary engineering fields such as Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM). This study examines how IEM Bachelor’s students perceive sustainability through their motivations, abilities, and external learning contexts, and how these perceptions configure student profiles. Drawing on qualitative workshops and interviews with 44 students in three IEM programs in Portugal, Germany, and Turkey, we identify three profiles: motivation-driven Sustainability Anticipators, ability-grounded Sustainability Pragmatists, and context-sensitive Sustainability Sceptics. Cross-profile insights reveal that (i) profiles are context-dependent configurations dominated by one of the profile components, (ii) transferable and interdisciplinary competences ground perceived sustainability ability, and (iii) students’ reasoning and articulation of sustainability motivation are conditional and dimensionally asymmetrical: intrinsic environmental sustainability concern becomes conditional on whether sustainability engagement is perceived, under prevailing labour-market conditions, as compatible with personal economic and social sustainability concerns. The study contributes to the theory and practice of sustainability in engineering education.