P&Q’s 2026 Best In Class: Colorado Boulder Leeds, Sustainability

Leeds MBA students visiting businesses focused on sustainability during their program.

Twenty-five years ago, business leader and alumnus Michael Leeds helped shape a new direction for the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business. With the Leeds name came a commitment to put ethics, social responsibility, and sustainability at the heart of business education. Today, that commitment reaches across finance, accounting, marketing, operations, and strategy.

Leeds students study at a university with more than 1,000 climate and sustainability researchers, 12 research institutes, and more than 75 research centers, with access to local cleantech and natural products businesses.

Since its naming, Leeds has steadily built on its foundation, establishing its Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility in 2007, adding a Clean Energy MBA Pathway in 2021, and helping launch Boulder Climate Ventures in 2025. With a new Master of Science in Sustainable Business welcoming its first students this fall, Leeds is Poets&Quants’ 2026 Best in Class Award for Sustainability.

SUSTAINABILITY IN EVERY COURSE

“We are known as a school that has deep roots in sustainability and we are in a community that really supports that work,” Kristi Ryujin, associate dean for graduate programs, told P&Q. “Boulder embraces these ideas, not only as ideals or values, but also through the industries that come here.”

Today, full-time MBAs can pursue both clean energy and sustainability pathways, while undergraduates have a Sustainable Business Area of Emphasis and a Social Responsibility and Ethics Certificate. Sustainability is embedded into functional coursework through climate-related financial risk, ESG reporting, sustainable brand strategy, and operations decisions under emissions regulations. Its longer-term ambition is to embed measurable sustainability content in every undergraduate and MBA course.

In the 2026 academic year, 477 undergraduates and graduate students participated in CESR programming, including Sustainability Scholars who receive funding and resources to pursue careers in sustainability and social impact. There’s also the Sustainable Business Club and Net Impact community while six sustainability skills workshops covered cleantech financial modeling, community engagement, and climate literacy. Impact internships, piloted in 2025 and expanded in 2026, connect students with environmental and social nonprofits.

Students also test their learning against corporate challenges through the longstanding Leeds Sustainability Case Competition. In 2026, graduate teams tackled the “Warehouse of the Future,” a challenge developed with Iron Mountain that examined energy use, operational efficiency, and the carbon footprint of commercial facilities. With $17,500 in prizes at stake, teams presented strategies weighing financial, environmental, and social returns.

Named 25 years ago around Michael Leeds’ vision to embed ethics, social responsibility, and sustainability directly into the core foundation of business education, Leeds School of Business still operates under those guiding principles

THE RESEARCH AND THE RECOGNITION

In research, Leeds participates in the Global Business Impact and Citizen Wellbeing initiative, collaborating with Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Technical University of Munich to examine financial well-being, climate sustainability, housing, food systems, and challenges facing vulnerable populations. Professor Jeff York, a fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, studies environmental entrepreneurship, exploring how ecological goals and economic performance can reinforce one another, with implications for entrepreneurs building climate-tech businesses.

In 2026, CU Boulder became the first U.S. institution named Sustainability Institution of the Year at the International Green Gown Awards, recognizing progress across university operations, academics, and community engagement. A year earlier, CU Boulder became the first U.S. public university selected for Breakthrough Energy’s University Climate Ventures Network, joining institutions including Stanford and MIT.

The university also earned 98 out of 99 points in the Princeton Review’s 2026 Guide to Green Colleges and ranked No. 12 nationally for sustainability in the 2025 QS rankings. Leeds’ broader research strength complements those university-wide honors: It ranked No. 32 in North America in the UTD business school research rankings covering 2020–2025.

David Drake, faculty director of the MS in Sustainable Business, Kathryn Wendell, executive director of the Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility, and Leeds students share sustainability work at the Leeds Impact Showcase

DON’T MISS LAST YEAR’S WINNER FOR MBA BEST IN CLASS IN SUSTAINABILITY: EDHEC BUSINESS SCHOOL

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