BEST's 2026 position statement

STEM higher education serves instrumental importance in the development of a generation of engineers who will go on to become the architects of tomorrow - visionary leaders building a better world to leave behind. In an age of technical excellence and ever increasing ambition, new kinds of challenges meet engineers, beyond the need for traditional technical proficiency. The engineering profession deals with emerging issues of sustainability, inclusion, transparency, and ethics, demanding of engineers a more holistic approach to their work. In turn, this demands from STEM institutions a proactive, strategic and comprehensive new approach in training and educating those engineers. These themes must be strategically embedded in an engineer’s formative educational years, and reinforced throughout their career. Amidst the changing tides in STEM education, some institutions, such as the Grenoble Alpes University with their PISTE curriculum and the Prometheus Challenge, are spearheading novel curricular reforms, designed to educate a generation of responsible engineers utilising teaching methods such as case studies, workshops, and project-based learning. However, many institutions are still transitioning from traditional teaching methods, or haven’t even started this process. The Board of European Students of Technology, as the largest STEM student organisation in Europe, unequivocally recognises, and strongly emphasises, the importance of instilling responsible values in future engineers at every stage of their formal education - a process involving a range of BEST’s stakeholders: universities, industry, policy makers and the European Union itself. We call for proactiveness, anticipation and collaboration between all these stakeholders in this process, because it is only through consistent exposure to these values that we can produce engineers that will build a better world, not simply a more profitable one. Driven by this pressingly important topic for the future of Europe, as part of our Educational Involvement Programme, we carried out research encompassing literature review, digital surveys focusing on quantitative data, and three interactive BEST Symposia on Education. We gathered the voices of STEM students across all 29 countries and 83 universities that we are present in. This process revealed not only the perception students have about responsible engineering, but also the vibrant potential that lies in investing in this area. The results are clear: according to our research, students are lacking a complete perspective on what responsible engineering is or why it’s important, rating themselves 5.2/10 on Responsible Engineering principles understanding. Almost 40% of students studied in universities with no specific measures on Responsible Engineering in place, a majority of them in universities that do not include student opinions in curriculum reviews. They are unexposed to the complexities of real world projects where concerns about the effectiveness and financial efficiency of their solutions should be balanced with their environmental and social impact. Especially notable during our BEST Symposia on Education was the challenge in establishing a consistent definition and framework for ethics, since perception varied greatly according to cultural background. While initiatives to mitigate this exist, in the form of ethical codes for engineering (some of which BEST has supported, such as SEFI’s Archimedean Oath), they are not widely adopted, nearly a third of surveyed students have never heard of them.