Impact Courses You Won’t Want to Miss in Fall 2025
Learn about several courses with a social impact and sustainability focus which are being offered across multiple degree programs, undergrad and grad level, in Fall 2025!
What follows is a curated list. For the complete list of hundreds of impact and sustainability courses being offered on the UM Ann Arbor campus, visit the Courses Page of our UM Impact Roadmap.
–
Business |
FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Base of the Pyramid: Business Innovation and Social Impact (BA 445)
Professor: Ted London | Credits: 3
Fall 2025
Section 1: Monday/Wednesday (23 sessions) | 1-2:30 pm
Friday “Interactive Lab” sessions (Oct. 31 & Nov. 14) | 9:00am-noon
Section 2: Monday/Wednesday (23 sessions) | 2:30-4 pm
Friday “Interactive Lab” sessions (Oct. 31 & Nov. 14) | 9:00am-noon
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid (BA 612)
Professor: Ted London | Credits: 2.25
Fall (B) 2025
Tuesday/Thursday (11 sessions)| 12:40-2:10pm
Thursday “Interactive Lab” sessions (Oct. 30, Nov. 13 & Nov. 20) | 5:30-8:30pm
These courses focus on using the power of business to create a more inclusive world, with a particular emphasis on the base of the pyramid (BoP) — the four billion people who earn less than $3,000/year.
New business models in health, energy, housing, technology, agriculture and other impact areas offer the tantalizing promise of ‘doing well by doing good.’ Using a carefully crafted set of case studies, simulations, videos, and readings, we will apply these learnings to better understand successful BoP venture development by companies, social entrepreneurs, and non-profit organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Weaving together concepts of strategic management, international business, cross-sector collaboration, and poverty alleviation, a key deliverable of the course is to provide students with the strategies, skills, tools, and processes necessary to develop and lead sustainable, scalable enterprises that deliver positive social impacts to the world’s most impoverished citizens.
For more information, please contact Prof. Ted London.
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
LBLE – Living Business Leadership Experience (BA 656)
Professor: Mike Barger | Credits: 3
Fall 2025
FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
LBLE – Living Business Leadership Experience (BA 456)
Professor: Mike Barger | Credits: 3
Fall 2025
.jpg)
Living Business Leadership Experience (LBLE) is a 3.0 credit-hour, full semester, Ross elective course where graduate and upper-level undergraduate students from across the University collaborate to shape, implement, and lead high-impact business initiatives alongside company founders and senior leaders of actual businesses. Whether you’re interested in learning business by doing business, working in a cross-functional team, or navigating complex and ambiguous business environments, this course will give you the chance to develop your leadership skills and dive headfirst into the challenges of real business.
Learn How to Enroll. To learn more about upcoming Fall 2025 enrollment, email rossactionlearning@umich.edu.
FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
The Economics of Sustainability (BE 401)
Professor: Tom Lyon | Credits: 3
Fall 2025
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
Energy Markets and Energy Politics (BE 527)
Professor: Tom Lyon | Credits: 3
Fall 2025
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
Non-market Strategy: Shaping the Rules of the Game (BE 555)
Professor: Tom Lyon | Credits: 3
Fall 2025
What, if anything, does it mean to say that a company is sustainable? The first course here will explore that body of knowledge, placing it within the larger context of environmental economics, and the economics of sustainability more broadly.
The goal of the second course is to give students a solid grasp of the environmental and social impacts of, and the institutions that govern, energy use, so that you can play a more effective role in shaping future policy or business decisions.
And the third course examines legal rules or public policies that favor certain business capabilities over others. In this context, companies affected by non-market government policies can create and change the rules of the game.
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
Management as Calling (MO 635)
Professor: Andy Hoffman
Credits: 1.5 | Fall 2025
This course is a series of immersive retreat experiences designed to help you look deep inside yourself to discern your calling, moving away from the simple pursuit of a career for private personal gain and towards a vocation that is based on a higher and more internally derived purpose about leading commerce and serving society. The structure of this program includes two remote retreats for guided self-examination and discernment based on four components: (1) readings, (2) guided lectures and exercises, (3) peer mentoring and feedback, and (4) periods of self-reflection. This course is capped at 40 slots and requires an application to be accepted. It is available to business students in their final year of study.
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
Legal Aspects of Managing Human Capital and DEI (BL 514)
Professor: Dana Muir
Credits: 2.25 | Fall 2025 (B)
Monday and Wednesday: 2:10-4:30
This course focuses on creating frameworks for assessing legal issues in common situations involving human capital. We will discuss practical implications for hiring, firing and giving performance reviews as well as common workplace issues like harassment, discrimination, and privacy. As diversity, equity, and inclusion become increasingly important in the management and development of human capital, that has become a throughline in all workplace interactions. We will discuss how the law both limits and facilitates formal and informal DEI efforts. The goal of this course is to enable you to better evaluate future employment issues, understand your rights as an employee or independent contractor, and be a more effective manager. The course will focus heavily on the application of the law in actual and hypothetical situations. As a result, many of the class discussions will concentrate on course opinions and litigated situations. BL 514 fulfills the MBA Law/Ethics Requirement.
For more information, please contact Prof. Dana Muir
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
Business in Society (STRAT 680)
Professor: Christie Barrett | Credits: 1.5
Fall 2025(A)
The world faces many large problems such as climate change, environmental degradation, global poverty, and inequality. This has led many people to argue that business should take the lead in addressing these problems and fulfill its corporate social responsibility (CSR). At the same time, business is under increasing pressure from activist shareholders to maximize shareholder value. The primary goal of this course is to prepare you to deal with this challenge as a top executive in private or public organization by giving you an opportunity to explore competing views in depth and to work out your own position on them.
Sustainability |
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
Strategy 564: Strategies for Sustainable Development: Enterprise Integration
Professor: Kevin Self | Credits: 1.5
Fall 2025 (A)
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
Strategy 565: Strategies for Sustainable Development: Market Transformation
Professor: Stu Hart | Credits: 1.5
Fall 2025 (B)
These courses will cover the concepts, frameworks and strategies through which corporations address important
sustainability issues and offer content to prepare students for the cutting-edge issues that are on the horizon. In the first course, we will cover issues like the triple bottom line, sustainability reporting, impact investing, the LOHAS consumer, sustainable operations, sustainable sourcing, and competitive strategy. In the second course, we will cover issues like the circular economy, clean technology, business and poverty, sustainable consumption, system change, and the transformation of capitalism.
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
Climate Change vs. Everything Else Causing Ecosystems Impairments (EAS 519.001)
Professor: Allen Burton | Credits: 2
Fall 2025
This course tackles tough realities that human-dominated ecosystems are subjected to a plethora of physical, chemical, and biological stressors – which in part are related to 1) land uses, 2) societal and political norms, 3) economic constraints, and 4) the sensitivity and resilience of the regional ecosystems. These many stressors intertwine with climate change drivers (flooding, drought, wildfires, higher temperatures) and vary in their extent and magnitude depending on their geographic setting (ecoregion), socio-economic conditions, education, and cultural/historical traditions.In general, increased poverty shifts the importance of managing stressors to basic remedies dealing with sewage, erosion, habitat destruction, flashy and intense runoff and plastic litter. The interactions of physical, chemical and biological stressors must be understood in order to design effective and efficient adaptation management strategies.
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
Energy Justice (EAS 525.001)
Professor: Tony Reames | Credits: 3
Fall 2025
Energy justice is one of the central global issues of our time, with profound implications for health and welfare, freedom and security, equity and due process, and technology development and implementation. This course explores the intersection of energy and equity issues related to a variety of domestic and global energy dynamics, to include ways for rectifying persistent unequal distributions of energy resources to ensure reliable, clean, and affordable energy access.
Policy and Law |
FOR GRADUATE & UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Real-World Perspectives on Poverty Solutions
Fall 2025
Halfway between a course and seminars is the Poverty Solutions Speaker Series. Real World Perspectives on Poverty Solutions introduces key issues regarding the causes and consequences of poverty through an in-person lecture series featuring experts in policy and practice from across the nation. Our goal is to help build a broad community of learners to engage in these issues together. This series is free and open to the public. The events will be hosted Fridays at noon unless otherwise noted, in the School of Social Work ECC 1840 as well as live-streamed on YouTube. Speakers and subjects to be announced soon.