Student’s perception of sustainable university – on the example of Bialystok University of Technology

Abstract

Measuring university sustainability is an important tool for assessing and monitoring progress towards more sustainable practices and outcomes at Higher Education Institutions (HEI). This article contributes to the development of research based on stakeholders theory in universities (Miller et al., 2014), taking into account the perception of the main group of university stakeholders, i.e. students, towards sustainable university. The research objective is to empirically verify perceptions and compare the level of implementation of the sustainable university concept among students of Bialystok University of Technology. In the theoretical part, a systematic literature review was conducted. The most frequent keywords related to the topic of sustainable university were also extracted as a part of the bibliometric analysis using the VOSviewer software. In the empirical part, descriptive statistics and difference tests (U-Man Whitney) were used to identify statistically significant differences between different groups of students in terms of perception of the sustainable university concept. In light of the research conducted, it can be concluded that Bialystok University of Technology is making efforts in various areas of sustainable development. However, there are specific areas where improvements can be made, such as enhancing awareness among students about the university's sustainable development strategy, promoting critical thinking, and addressing uncertainties about certain campus activities and management policies. In the article, a new scale was developed to examine students' perceptions of a sustainable university. It includes 30 items, is based on the areas of sustainable development of universities discussed in previous studies, and takes into account new criteria, in particular, those related to ESG factors.