Sustainability, including environmental and social sustainability, has been identified across all
sectors, from government to industry to academia, as a critical area for action. Sustainability
goals and actions, by necessity, require input from many fields, but engineers play a potentially
outsized role due to the structures and products they build, and the associated choices they make.
The Engineering for One Planet (EOP) initiative aims to address this challenge by ensuring all
future engineers, no matter their discipline, are equipped with the skills, knowledge,
understanding, and mindsets to design, build, and create in sustainable ways. Much has been
achieved to date by the EOP initiative, through a process of multi-stakeholder engagement, in
both understanding and piloting solutions to realize the EOP vision. However, in order to achieve
the far reaching systemic changes desired, a roadmap for a Collective Impact-informed,
cross-sector, collaborative initiative was developed. This roadmap leverages the approaches
yielded from the recent National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded EOP Scaling for Impact
Workshop, the lessons learned and results achieved from the initiative to date, and key
considerations drawn from a Collective Impact approach that centers equity. This roadmap calls
for stakeholders—including academia, industry, accrediting and professional organizations,
community organizations, non-profits, funders, and those communities most impacted by the
negative impacts of environmental and social sustainability challenges— to move beyond
singular programmatic interventions, and instead work to collaboratively understand and
construct coordinated solutions, to integrating sustainability into engineering education and the
engineering profession. The roadmap’s call to action invites collaborators to join this initiative
and engage with the roadmap as a starting point for their work together; the roadmap provides
immediate action steps, and invites collaborators to further shape the roadmap into a collective,
achievable plan for systems change, that they, their institutions/organizations, and other
cross-sector collaborators can embrace. For systems change is never complete and the solutions
not finite; it is only through ongoing, collective action that we can fully understand, and learn
how to address the lack of sustainability in engineering as the complex, social problem it is.
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Systematic shifts in scaling behavior based on organizational strategy in universities
To build better theories of cities, companies, and other social institutions such as universities, requires that we understand the tradeoffs and complementarities that exist between their core functions, and that we understand bounds to their growth. Scaling theory has been a powerful tool for addressing such questions in diverse physical, biological and urban systems, revealing systematic quantitative regularities between size and function. Here we apply scaling theory to the social sciences, taking a synoptic view of an entire class of institutions. The United States higher education system serves as an ideal case study, since it includes over 5,800 institutions with shared broad objectives, but ranges in strategy from vocational training to the production of novel research, contains public, nonprofit and for-profit models, and spans sizes from 10 to roughly 100,000 enrolled students. We show that, like organisms, ecosystems and cities, universities and colleges scale in a surprisingly systematic fashion following simple power-law behavior. Comparing seven commonly accepted sectors of higher education organizations, we find distinct regimes of scaling between a school’s total enrollment and its expenditures, revenues, graduation rates and economic added value. Our results quantify how each sector leverages specific economies of scale to address distinct priorities. Taken together, the scaling of features within a sector along with the shifts in scaling across sectors implies that there are generic mechanisms and constraints shared by all sectors, which lead to tradeoffs between their different societal functions and roles. We highlight the strong complementarity between public and private research universities, and community and state colleges, that all display superlinear returns to scale. In contrast to the scaling of biological systems, our results highlight that much of the observed scaling behavior is modulated by the particular strategies of organizations rather than an immutable set of constraints.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10309394
- Editor(s):
- Amaral, Luís A.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PLOS ONE
- Volume:
- 16
- Issue:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 1932-6203
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254582
