Higher education is increasingly under attack for what and how students learn. Some of that is political. Some is deserved. “Energy” is now one such political battleground. Environmental studies have swallowed the energy domain, stripping it of realism and producing too many graduates unready for the real world.
Affordable, reliable energy is the bedrock of human flourishing. Societies with more use more—and tend to improve their environmental footprint. Future employees, innovators, and leaders eager to tackle environmental challenges, create sound policies, reduce poverty, and build advanced industries—and argue from facts—must learn fundamentals about the systems that power literally everything.
Nonetheless, as the NCEA research found in ranking universities by the share of “agnostic” coursework, some schools do approach a healthy balance. But most of the top 50 do not. In too many catalogs, you can earn “energy” credentials without a hard look at the realities of baseload power, capacity factors, dispatchability, materials and mining, liquid natural gas logistics, refining, or the geopolitics of fuels. There’s too much wishful training, not education.
This is not an argument to ignore climate or environmental studies. It’s an argument to teach energy as a system. Physics, geology, engineering, economics, and geopolitics all matter. Electricity and fuels are not interchangeable. Heavy transport and petrochemicals have little to do with residential demand. Intermittency, inherent to wind and solar power, is not a moral failing; it’s a technical fact that must be managed. That data centers rank as only a small contributor to overall global energy consumption matters little when, in the United States, artificial intelligence is driving the first spike in electricity consumption in several decades. And yes, hydrocarbons remain pivotal even in optimistic transition scenarios. Graduates who don’t understand basic realities won’t be able to run the world we have, let alone build the one we want.
Reform is straightforward: First, raise students’ energy IQ by making “Energy Reality 101” core. Every policy, business, law, and general engineering student should be exposed to a quantitative survey covering realities of power versus energy, reliability, cost, grids, mining and materials, fuel logistics, and the trade-offs across all major technologies—and the state of play for what is going on in the markets for oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydro, not just wind and solar.
Second, rebalance the catalog. Departments should target a mix such that at least a reasonable share of offerings cover systems and markets, the nature of technologies that dominate world supply (i.e., including fossil fuels), and a full scope look at trade-offs. That’s closer to the work and policy world students will later encounter.
There would be some significant benefit to linking credit to site visits and practicums: grid control centers, substations, refineries and gas plants, ports and liquid natural gas terminals, mines and recycling facilities, wind and solar sites. Seeing maintenance, intermittency, safety culture, and permitting constraints speaks louder than intangible numbers and ideas.
For better or worse, energy is politically charged. Any reform of curricula must be paired with durable protections for free speech and debate—something that has become far more obvious these days. Teach students how to argue with facts—especially on subjects in which physics, economics, and environmental goals collide.
Energy is complicated precisely because it underpins everything. Energy and the technologies that supply it are intimately linked to prosperity. Different areas of the system require different tools and timelines. But turning college syllabi into a single-destination campaign deprives students of the very literacy that innovation and stewardship demand.
