Abstract
This paper assesses university sustainability from the perspective of the interested student. A set of questions for a university website analysis is proposed and preliminary results for Swedish universities are presented. The university website analysis intends to emulate a student looking for a university working with sustainable development. University ranking is compared with the results from the sustainability assessment. Results from the study are based on university website analysis of 18 Swedish universities out of a total of 30. Universities are grouped in high ranked, low ranked and benchmark universities. For the majority of the studied universities it was possible to extract the information needed for a sustainability assessment from the website, which indicates that further development of the method is of interest. The average level of performance in the assessment was found to be less than 50% of the maximum of the proposed scale. With Sweden generally being a leading nation in sustainable development the results are below of what could be expected. Ranking, based on the Swedish ranking system does not seem to predict university sustainability performance. The indication is that Gothenburg University, while having further improvement potential, could be considered a benchmark in the Swedish context.
Highlights
The Brundtland commission definition from 1987 states that: Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs [1]
The purpose of this paper is to propose how university sustainability could be assessed from a student perspective and based on this to make a preliminary assessment of the level of sustainability of Swedish universities
The URANK-model does not include any parameters relating to sustainable development apart from some social factors relating to student recruiting, which could be one explanation to the lack of correlation
Summary
The Brundtland commission definition from 1987 states that: Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs [1]. It could be said that higher education and universities have an essential role in advancing the understanding of requirements for sustainable development, and providing society and industries with relevant competencies in the field [2,3,4]. “An understanding of sustainability issues should be a key component of degree programmes” [5]. Those graduating today are those that will have to deal with all the challenges of sustainability. It is of interest to study how to assess university work with sustainable development. Cross-institutional sustainability assessment is needed to advance strong initiatives and assist lagging colleges and universities” [6]
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