Interdisciplinary Curriculum Reform: Integrating Sustainability and Employability in Higher Education

Universities worldwide face the twin challenges of preparing students for an increasingly uncertain employment landscape and enabling them to be agents of change in the world's sustainability transition. This paradigm of disciplinary silos has led to graduates with narrow but deep expertise, unsuited to the "wicked" problems of the 21st century.

The paper proposes a conceptual model and design guidelines for interdisciplinary higher education curriculum reform that holistically incorporates sustainability literacy and postgraduate employability. The research, drawing on constructivist pedagogies, competency-based learning, and empirical data from higher education reform experiments, contends that integrating social-scientific inquiry, digital literacy, and sustainability ethics into the curriculum increases student motivation and employability.

The new Sustainability-Employability Nexus (SEN) Model structures curriculum along three interlinked dimensions: systems thinking and ecological literacy; digital and data skills for sustainable development goals; and ethical leadership and multicultural collaboration. The case-study data show that graduates from SEN reforms are more likely to gain employment in mission-driven organizations and score higher on problems of interdisciplinary character.

The paper also addresses the institutional challenges of reform, such as rigid accreditation standards, faculty pushback, and budget shortfalls, and offers governance principles for adapting the model to a variety of highereducation settings.