Students’ attitudes towards campus sustainability: a comparison among three universities in Sweden

The role of higher education institutions (HEIs) in promoting and supporting sustainability has outstretched over the past decades as a result of various declarations and commitments related to the need for sustainability in HEI. As a consequence, HEIs tried to achieve campus sustainability by integrating sustainability concept into their projects, partnerships, assessments, programs, curricula, and research. Accordingly, achieving campus sustainability is not feasible without the involvement of students as the biggest stakeholders of HEI. The students have a substantial impact on sustainability by contributing to and supporting campus sustainability. This research aims to compare and analyse the attitudes of students towards campus sustainability in relation to the influence of the university. The research is conducted at three universities in Sweden, which have different environmental management system certification status. A questionnaire-based survey is employed to collect the data from students at these three universities. It aims to investigate the university’s efforts to support sustainability and students’ awareness towards those efforts and also to measure students’ attitudes towards campus sustainability. The (one-way) analysis of variance is then used to investigate whether there is any difference (statistically) among the means of students’ attitudes at these three universities. The result shows that there is a statistically significant difference in these universities. Analysis and discussion are also provided to identify the reasons behind the result.