OING "GREEN" IS BIG ON CAMPUS and it’s being superceded by a more holistic notion of "sustainability." Sustainability is itself the leading edge of a more powerful "social entrepreneurship" movement driven by the demands of a new generation of students. Sustainability and social entrepreneurship have huge implications regarding whom you can recruit, what you’ll be teaching them and what you and they can expect upon graduation.

In general, green means environmentally friendly. Sustainability has an official definition that was conceived in 1987 by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (more commonly known as the Brundtland Commission): development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Social entrepreneurship (SE) goes a step further. A social entrepreneur recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial business principles to organize, create and manage a venture to make social change. A growing number of campuses believe the sustainability and SE movements are so compelling that they are offering courses, creating degrees, chartering schools and even re-branding themselves around such principles.

Meet four people with social well-being in their blood. Margo Flood directs the Environmental Leadership Center at tiny Warren Wilson College. Charles Redman helped launch and now runs the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Brett Smith runs the Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Miami of Ohio. Author David Bornstein didn’t invent the SE movement, but he is one of its modern prophets.

The modern manifestation of the green movement on campus began with solid waste recycling and early-stage energy efficiency efforts like turning out the lights when you leave.

The College and University Recycling Council (CURC) began RecycleMania, a 10-week competition among U.S. campuses to collect the largest amount of recyclables per capita, the largest amount of total recyclables, the least amount of trash per capita and achieve the highest recycling rate.

Sophisticated green buildings now increase energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions using LEED standards. The tiered LEED certification is based on a point system that encourages sourcing wood from local suppliers, reusing materials from other sites, employing local builders, reducing the carbon footprint, improving indoor air quality and reducing energy consumption. Other examples range from composting to burning fryer oil as fuel to mixing ground-up tires with concrete for benches. Each of those activities can spawn a business.

Meanwhile, emerging sustainability principles involve reconciling today’s environmental decisions with the future. Solving today’s problem only to have the solution cause havoc later is not acceptable. Ethanol may reduce dependence on foreign oil, but many contend it is not in everyone’s best interest to burn food as fuel when people are starving or when it drives up the price of corn, which in turn dramatically drives up the price of breakfast cereal and meat. Using compact fluorescents is good, but only if there is a plan to safely dispose of the bulbs’ mercury content.

When a new idea of import emerges, a new association emerges to promote it. AASHE, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, is a member organization of colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada founded in 2006 to promote sustainability in all sectors of higher education. AASHE partners campuses with businesses, nonprofit organizations and government agencies.

With $25 million from philanthropist Julie Ann Wrigley, Arizona State University has created a Global Institute for Sustainability as well as a School of Sustainability that offers graduate and undergraduate degrees—not courses, degrees—in sustainability, as well as executive education offerings. The school’s mission is to create and share knowledge, train a new generation of scholars and practitioners and develop practical solutions. "We need people who are comfortable working from the widest possible range of perspectives," says Charles Redman, the school’s director. "So we encompass architecture, business, engineering, social, life and physical sciences and aspects of the humanities. We are problem-based rather than discipline-oriented."

Social Entrepreneurship has come to campus. Brett Smith, assistant professor and founder of the Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, describes this emerging area as the application of the creativity and imagination of entrepreneurship for social good, rather than private wealth creation.

Gifford Pinchot III is grandson of the environmentalist who started the U.S parks system, and he has founded the new Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Washington state, which offers an MBA in Sustainable Business as well as related certificates. The ultimate vision is to infuse environmentally and socially responsible business innovation into general business practice.

Regardless of their academic discipline, many students expect to graduate equipped to successfully lead a corporation, small business or non-profit organization toward sustainability as a core strategy. Many others expect to launch their own sustainable entrepreneurial ventures.

Activists like Arizona State University president Michael Crow are building their schools’ brands around sustainability and social entrepreneurship, seeing that those principles are fused into all dimensions of the school’s operations. The Princeton Review and Campus Compact publish a list of "Colleges With a Conscience." Their website proclaims: "Colleges with a Conscience will help you find a school that won’t force you to choose between your desire to make the world a better place and your desire to succeed in college."