Abstract
In the 21st century, sustainability and indicators of world-class universities have come within the scope of an academic cottage industry. The complex problem of university sustainability implies a big challenge for countries and educators to implement important strategies in an integrated and comprehensive way. This paper highlights and analyzes the sustainability indicators of universities included as newly formed world-class universities (NFWCUs) in the top 100 from 2010 and 2018. The integration of three global ranking scales—the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), the Quacquarelli–Symonds World University Ranking (QS) and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THEs)—allows us to minimize the impact of the methodology used. This study integrates regression analysis by using statistical grouping, case studies and normative analysis. Our principal findings are as follows: among the commonly ranked top 100 universities in 2018, the ARWU, QS and THE counted 57, compared with 47 in 2010. Thus, comparing 2010 and 2018 shows that 44 of the universities appeared simultaneously in ARWU, QS and THE rankings and maintained a sustainable position in any ranking system in the family of top 100 groups. Three lower-ranked NFWCUs in the hybrid list for 2010 lost their ranking and did not appear in the group of top 100 universities in 2018, which are covered by some catch-up and young universities. The NFWCUs were from US, Australia, China, Singapore, Germany and Belgium. By systematic comparison, the US and UK continued to dominate the stability of NFWCUs in 2010 and 2018. The key sustainability indicators include a high concentration of talent, abundant resources to offer a rich learning environment and conduct advanced research. Generally, the factors were negatively associated with ranking suggesting that a higher score result in top ranking and vice versa. Teaching, research, citation and international outlook were negatively correlated with THE ranking in 2018. Similarly, Alumni and PUB were negatively associated with ARWU ranking in 2018. All factors except international student ratio were significantly correlated in QS ranking either in 2010 or 2018, where negative association was observed. The significant contribution of our study is to highlight that for the sustainability of universities, it is necessary to have an increasing emphasis on the effectiveness and efficiency of government-supported research, stability of investments and more approaches to employ international initiatives. The results also confirm the appropriate governance, developing global students and place emphasis on science and technology as additional factors in the approaches of pathways to NFWCUs, with delivery of outstanding educational programs and comprehensive internationalization as a key indicator for performance improvement and global university ranking systems.
Highlights
Over the past few decades, the concept of world-class universities (WCU), called globally competitive, elite, early formed or traditional universities, has emerged
The timeframe appeared to be a period during which the governance of several universities-initiated excellence initiatives. Such an approach allowed us to deal with the criticism of inconsistent ranking results because of different methodologies used by the three selected systems; if we look a single ranking list, it is not enough to fully judge the quality and level of a university, so it seemed that integrating the top three ranking systems to evaluate the sustainability indicators of newly formed world-class universities (NFWCUs) would be more comprehensive for this study
018 NFWCUs, the figure indicates that 44 universities continuously maintained their status among the top 1050
Summary
Over the past few decades, the concept of world-class universities (WCU), called globally competitive, elite, early formed or traditional universities, has emerged. At present, this term has become a catchphrase, in terms of improving the quality of learning and research in higher education and for sustainability and developing the capacity to compete explicitly in the global higher education marketplace [1,2,3,4,5]. Since the appearance of global university rankings in 2003, the goal of establishing and changing universities to WCU is to be able to compete in the global knowledge economy [6,7]. At the same time, establishing world leading position has been ambition of both government and top universities
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