A Comparative Analysis between Global University Rankings and Environmental Sustainability of Universities

Abstract

Global University Rankings (GURs) intend to measure the performance of universities worldwide. Other rankings have recently appeared that evaluate the creation of environmental policies in universities, e.g., the Universitas Indonesia (UI) GreenMetric. This work aims to analyze the interaction between the Top 500 of such rankings by considering the geographical location of universities and their typologies. A descriptive analysis and a statistical logistical regression analysis were carried out. The former demonstrated that European and North American universities predominated the Top 500 of GURs, while Asian universities did so in the Top 500 of the UI GreenMetric ranking, followed by European universities. Older universities predominated the Top 500 of GURs, while younger ones did so in the Top 500 of the UI GreenMetric ranking. The second analysis demonstrated that although Latin American universities were barely present in the Top 500 of GURs, the probability of them appearing in the Top 500 of the UI GreenMetric ranking was 5-fold. We conclude that a low association exists between universities’ academic performance and their commitment to the natural environment in the heart of their institutions. It would be advisable for GURs to include environmental indicators to promote sustainability at universities and to contribute to climate change.

SEM Model Analysis on the Effect of Antecedents of the University of Nairobi and Jiangsu University’s Academic Quality within the Higher Education Institutions

“…Evaluating and surveying HEIs' quality and reputation are highly useful as well to know their opinions concerning the weighting to assign to indicators for international comparative evaluations. Similar studies with this finding include (Astin & Solmon, 2012;Fayolle & Redford, 2014;Han & Xu, 2019;Jöns & Hoyler, 2013;Khamala, Makori, & Njiraine, 2018;Mukhwana et al, 2016;Muñoz-Suárez et al, 2020).…”

Universities’ Reporting on SDGs: Using THE Impact Rankings to Model and Measure Their Contribution to Sustainability

“…As far as we know, this is the first empirical research work to merge a university global indicator such as THE with a sustainability indicator of HEIs based on their SDG progress to measure the extent to which the SDGs are related to the best universities' overall rankings. To date, the aim of university rankings has only been to evaluate universities' academic and research reputation or their performance for promotion purposes [71,72], which does not necessarily mean that HEIs make any societal contribution [73][74][75]. In fact, as part of the metric management model included in the higher education system worldwide, university leaders have carefully paid attention to the quantitative metrics considered by international rankings (QS World Ranking, Shanghai Ranking, The World University Ranking, Scimago Institutions Ranking), such as the citation indicators in research evaluation and funding [73][74][75][76], whereas other qualitative dimensions, e.g., HEIs' societal contribution, have been neglected.…”

“…To date, the aim of university rankings has only been to evaluate universities' academic and research reputation or their performance for promotion purposes [71,72], which does not necessarily mean that HEIs make any societal contribution [73][74][75]. In fact, as part of the metric management model included in the higher education system worldwide, university leaders have carefully paid attention to the quantitative metrics considered by international rankings (QS World Ranking, Shanghai Ranking, The World University Ranking, Scimago Institutions Ranking), such as the citation indicators in research evaluation and funding [73][74][75][76], whereas other qualitative dimensions, e.g., HEIs' societal contribution, have been neglected. If this were true, then HEIs' leaders would be responsible for promoting elitism instead of equity and diversity through performance-based incentives [50,[76][77][78].…”

Investigating the Critical Issues for Enhancing Sustainability in Higher Education Institutes in Thailand

“…They considered to fulfill the sustainable knowledge to their curriculums (94.1%), support the educational system to embed the sustainable awareness to staff and students (82.4%), and supported the researchers to discover new innovations related to sustainability in their research (41.2%), whereas Group 2 had less educational system and research that support the sustainability (5.3%). Therefore, it can be concluded that the sustainable education performance can be enhanced by a green university ranking because it encourages academics based on sustainability, which is the basic objective of a green ranking [50][51][52][53].…”