York University’s Academic Plan 2020-2025 challenges the York community to deepen our collective contributions to the United Nations’ seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To demonstrate our growing impact, in 2022, York undertook an evaluation of its course inventory to map the university’s curriculum to the United Nations’ SDGs. In cooperation with the open-source initiative OSDG, York compiled a list of approximately 30,000 SDG-relevant keywords to cross list with York’s 2022 course inventory. Using OSDG’s AI-machine reading tool, course descriptions collected from York’s eleven faculties were scrutinized for content relevant to sixteen of the seventeen SDGs – SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals) is deemed too broad a category to currently track.
From this data set, York determined that of the 4236 courses in the 2022 course inventory, 1,635 were directly relevant to a Sustainable Development Goal (approximately 38.5% of all courses). Of these, a further 285 were relevant to multiple SDGs. This places York University as amongst the top echelon of global universities in the teaching and knowledge mobilization of the SDGs.
Number of York courses related to each Global Goal
78
4
242
235
157
18
17
259
215
50
188
13
42
9
7
378
