School of Sustainability

Stanford’s first new school in 70 years will launch this fall as the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, a new kind of school focused on cultivating deep knowledge and high-impact solutions to pressing planetary challenges. The school will have academic departments that advance subject understanding, interdisciplinary institutes that innovate across fields, and an accelerator focused on developing near-term policy and technology solutions.

And this is good timing, particularly from a school that has been ranked as #2 for the best schools for science, tech and society majors, as experts are predicting a boom in the sustainability job market. Business leaders are restructuring and expanding budgets to build sustainability teams, however, there’s still a lack of clear definition for many of these roles with very little pay benchmarking and clarity on how expected roles and responsibilities will evolve in this field of work.

But GreenBiz’s most recent benchmarking study, the State of the Profession 2022, suggests the average total compensation for sustainability managers is $146,900, $227,158 for directors and for vice presidents, an impressive $404,972. So not bad, however, we are also hearing from those currently competing for jobs in this market, it is highly competitive, and largely based on networking.