Student access and ESD at heart of Tec de Monterrey model

The Mexico-based private non-profit multi-campus university Tecnológico de Monterrey has been improving students’ access to sustainability-focused education, research and outreach activities as part of its ever-evolving sustainability efforts.

Tec de Monterrey is an unusual education organisation, delivering tertiary and secondary education. Headquartered in the northeast Mexican city of Monterrey and founded in 1943, Tec has 60,000 undergraduate and graduate students on campuses across 33 cities and also runs high schools educating more than 27,000 secondary students.

Sustainability is a key focus of this institution.

A Tec report issued in August 2024 said the institution had implemented 851 initiatives between January 2022 and December 2023 that contributed to progress in at least one of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), impacting more than 900,000 people in Mexico and abroad.

These initiatives included 211 projects targeting SDG 4, related to quality education, and 66 impacting SGD 10 to reduce inequalities. Examples included 87,825 free or low-cost courses offered online and in-person, and 47,556 pieces of educational material prepared free for students and the outside community, including YouTube videos, for instance.



Scholarships for student access and success

Paola Visconti, director of sustainable development at Tec de Monterrey, told University World News that 55% of tertiary undergraduate students at Tec receive some kind of financial support or scholarship from Tec programmes, such as Leaders of Tomorrow, which offers tuition fees for Tec students, not only from Mexico but also from other countries in Latin America.

According to the university, in the 2024-25 academic year, the initiative awarded 212 scholarships. They include “other types of [non-financial] support, such as mentoring, so that [students] also have support during their studies, which ensures that they can finish successfully,” added Visconti.

Luis Fernandez, sustainability academic coordinator at Tec de Monterrey, said it is a “private university that, in general, has been dominated for many years by an upper-middle socio-economic class”.

Without the enrolment of students from lower income backgrounds on such scholarships, these wealthy students live in a “socio-economic bubble that does not allow them to see the realities of the country”, he argued. Indeed, the scholarships enable students from different social groups within Mexico to make friends and build lifelong connections.

Such initiatives help Tec in its efforts to offer Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), which empowers individuals with the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes necessary to act for a sustainable future.

Fernandez said the scholarships help the university further the SDGs. As well as SDG 4 (Quality education) and SDG 10 (Reduced inequalities), that includes tackling poverty (SDG 1), hunger (SDG 2) and promoting gender equality (SDG 5). They also promote greater diversity.

Sustainability to be a design principle for all curricula

Tec de Monterrey has a strong track record regarding “support, work on, and promote sustainable development”, said Paola Visconti.

For instance, it has been involved in the Water Center for Latin America and the Caribbean project since 2008, a strategic alliance with the Monterrey-based FEMSA Foundation and the Inter-American Development Bank focusing on the management and sustainable use of water.

Another longstanding sustainability project is DistritoTec, an urban community created in 2014 to ensure quality of life and capacity for innovation.

In 2019, Visconti added, Tec de Monterrey joined the global campaign ‘Race to Zero for Universities and Colleges’, committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2040 through “commitments to integrate sustainable development into the curricula, to promote research aligned with sustainability, and to implement it throughout the institution”.

As a result of this commitment, Tec de Monterrey published its sustainability and climate change plan called Blue Route (Ruta Azul, in Spanish).

It has six pillars of policy goals: promoting a culture of sustainability; mitigating university environmental impacts; adapting the campus to address climate risks; integrating sustainability into curricula and student learning; encouraging research in sustainability; and engaging with society.

Regarding the pillar of education, Visconti said the goal is that all students “graduate with the necessary skills to, above all, make decisions with an awareness of sustainability”.

She said sustainability topics were added to the curriculum in 2019, with SDGs-relevant material in approximately 20% of courses, building on earlier work to design these subjects.

Fernandez said this work involved Tec de Monterrey managers reviewing the impact of sustainability education so that changes were not superficial, with senior academics noting that “sometimes it was just the description of the subject or the objective itself”. Very few subjects had integrated sustainability knowledge into “the assessment of the competency”.

Therefore, he added, the university worked until August 2023 to ensure it can “educate for sustainable development, which is no longer just conceptual, but is methodological, pedagogical”, and promote a “much more holistic integration” in which tertiary undergraduate students cannot graduate without knowledge about climate change.

That said, there is still work to do, Fernandez said, given that some academic programmes were already fixed and sustainability “could not be integrated into all of them”.

When curricula for these courses are next updated, “sustainable development would be a design principle for the subjects, and that is exactly what we are working on right now for the planned update, which will be in 2026,” Fernandez told University World News.

Guideline for including sustainability

Eyeing a “holistic understanding of sustainable development” with many social, cultural, economic and political aspects behind it, Tec de Monterrey has designed a guideline for the inclusion of sustainable development to help all the design teams of lecturers to integrate sustainability in the planned update, he explained.

Given that “we all have to deal with sustainable development, regardless of the degree”, the guidelines “outline the most important topics, the most relevant methodologies, the pedagogies according to the most current scientific literature, and a series of guidance – ethical principles that must be addressed,” Fernandez said.

That is because while students may manage sustainable development technically, “if they forget about society, if they forget about justice, then we are in trouble,” he stressed.

Moreover, Tec de Monterrey is working on a competency assessment model addressing transversal competencies that infiltrate sustainability skills into other competences and subjects, including a “future thinking competency”, he added.

“This competency means that students will have a framework to think about the future adequately, but not telling them what to think. It is a compass, not a command. So, students are able to think for themselves with the adequate tools to do it,” he explained.

Interdisciplinary studies, cooperation with society key

Such guidelines were developed by Tec de Monterrey academics promoting the Blue Route and the Tec’s Center for the Recognition of Human Dignity, both run under the vice presidency of inclusion, social impact and sustainability.

Both units have also been training lecturers and leaders in ESD, raising awareness about “gender equality, equity, justice and human dignity” and stressing that sustainability is not just about the environment, he emphasised.

Furthermore, said Visconti, since under Mexican law “all students must complete 480 hours of community service to earn their university degree”, Tec de Monterrey has been linking courses to applied projects related to the SDGs.

The Blue Route plan has also prompted a call for interdisciplinary research projects aligned with Tec de Monterrey’s mitigation goals. One of them is a very successful initiative of water harvesting and reuse in Monterrey, which can likely be scaled and implemented in all of the university’s campuses, said Visconti.

Said Fernandez: “This is also part of the intention to break away from the ivory tower of research…We do not want research that only serves as a publication and for presentations at conferences, but rather practical research that truly contributes to the objectives of the Blue Route.”

To boost the effectiveness of training, the university has been leveraging its many ties with the private sector, local government and the federal government through collaboration and cooperation, he said.

Indeed, because Tec de Monterrey is a prestigious institution in Mexico and abroad, the university has long been involving both civil society and private sector organisations to set up challenges and work with students to solve them.

Tec de Monterrey also participates with other universities and the United Kingdom-based higher education analytics firm Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) in its Future17 SDG Challenge, which is focused on developing 21st century skills while addressing the SDGs.

The goal is for academics to be able to link with companies in sustainable development, he added.

Fernandez said to succeed in its sustainability efforts, Tec de Monterrey still needs to make sure there is a holistic understanding among students and academics that sustainability is not a philanthropic issue that does not impact them, but rather is “an urgent situation” impacting the world that needs to be addressed by everyone.

A key consideration, said Fernandez is, “how can we empower and make each area of Tec de Monterrey take ownership [of sustainability] and do it appropriately?”

Many students are organising themselves in committees to put in place ideas to develop sustainability initiatives and they need guidance, he said, stressing that students should become “agents in the field” and work for sustainable development, not only at the university but ultimately impacting upon their local communities too.

The university is measuring how these initiatives impact the university and the wider community by assessing students’ and academics’ attitudes, behaviours, ideologies and knowledge about sustainability and climate change through a Sustainability Culture Index.

Its initial measurement, in 2022, established a baseline for the institution as a whole of 66.48 points on a scale of 100, with the next assessment under way now, for release later this year.

Fernandez said the index has shown that sustainability is essential for students, who “always link sustainability to their professional practice” and who often want to know the latest trends in sustainability and suggest ideas.