A baseline assessment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within European Student Union web environments

Abstract

The world of student unions is under-researched, particularly relating to global issues and challenges, despite them holding a large proportion of the future workforce. At present, the European Students Union (ESU) has a duty of care to approximately 15 million European students, with subsequent policies and information. This paper addresses the disparity between these areas, with a specific focus on the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals - in partnership with the UK National Union of Students, under the Dissertations for Good Programme. An innovative web mining method was created and refined over a 10-week data collection period on ESU public web domains using websites from January 2014-18. A pre-determined selection of seventeen key terms were used to quantify the overall knowledge and understanding of the Sustainable Development Goals on a country by country basis, with the UK National Union of Students as a control during the study. This resulted in the successful analysis of 39 ESUs, showing a wide range of keyword abundance, knowledge depth and breadth across member nations. 89% of all key term sites were located within the UK & Switzerland unions, creating 86% of all key terms found – highlighting disparity against developments in European Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). To conclude, this research has highlighted both the lack of visual representation of the Sustainable Development Goals to students and therefore, the variation in education quality across nations, allowing for potential inequality of sustainability skillsets required by graduates on a global scale to tackle global challenges.