Higher Education Sustainability Act

The federal government has no higher education grant-making program specifically for climate change education. It does however have a higher education grant making program for sustainability education, a very close cousin. The Higher Education Sustainability Act of 2021 authorizes the Department of Education to continue to operate the University Sustainability Program and makes minor updates to the USP grant-making criteria. USP makes two types of grants:

1. To individual colleges and universities to:
   • Develop and implement administrative and operations practices that test, model, and analyze principles of sustainability.
   • Establish multidisciplinary education, research, and outreach programs that address the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability.
   • Support research and teaching initiatives that focus on multidisciplinary and integrated environmental, economic, and social elements.
   • Scale established initiatives in the areas of energy management, greenhouse gas emissions reductions, green building, waste management, purchasing, toxics management, transportation, resilience, green workforce, and other aspects of sustainability.
   • Expand sustainability literacy on campus.
   • Integrate sustainability curricula in all programs of instruction, particularly in business, economics, law, political science, architecture, technology, manufacturing, engineering, and science programs.
2. To Partnerships (a nonprofit consortium, association, alliance, or collaboration operating in partnership with one or more colleges or universities) to:
   • To conduct faculty, staff and administrator training on the subjects related to sustainability and institutional change.
   • To compile, evaluate, and disseminate best practices, case studies, guidelines and standards regarding sustainability.
   • To engage external stakeholders such as business, city and state governments, alumni, and accrediting agencies in the process of building support for sustainability.
   • To conduct professional development programs for faculty to enable them to incorporate sustainability content in their courses.
   • To create the analytical tools necessary to assess and measure their individual progress toward fully sustainable campus operations and fully integrating sustainability into the curriculum.
   • To develop educational benchmarks for institutions of higher education to determine the necessary rigor and effectiveness of academic sustainability programs.

A short history of the bill

In 2007, the Campaign for Environmental Literacy worked with Senator Patty Murray and Representative Earl Blumenauer to create the Higher Education Sustainability Act. We then led the effort to enlist over 300 college and university presidents and 25 higher education associations to endorse this bill. The bill language was subsequently included in the Higher Education Opportunity Act which became law in 2008, and the program created by the bill language at the Department of Education is called the University Sustainability Program (USP). USP made grants in FY2010, but Congress did not fund it in subsequent years. The Higher Education Act is now up for reauthorization, and we are fighting to keep the USP language in the reauthorized bill.

Current status: In 2019, the House issued their version of a new higher education act, called the College Affordability Act (H.R. 4674), which was passed by the Education and Labor Committee but did not get a vote by the full House. Our assumption is that this same bill will be reintroduced this year. Thanks to the help of many organizations and individuals, this bill includes the University Sustainability Program.

We took a different tack in the Senate. We asked Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) to introduce a new, stand-alone Higher Education Sustainability Act, which he kindly agreed to do (S. 2829) in 2019. Now we have a vehicle for which we can recruit co-sponsors and thus demonstrate growing Senate support.

While this bill died at the end of the 116th Congress, we expect that it will be reintroduced in the beginning of 2021.