Insights on Sustainable Universities from Economic and Statistical Perspectives

Abstract

Currently, the issues on sustainability receive extremely high interest, especially from young generation. This makes universities as key participants in sustainable development as far as they provide wide possibilities for engagement in the process. Despite many studies devoted to universities as participants of sustainable development, there still is insufficient knowledge about their contribution to the process. Mostly, studies are qualitative and consider certain examples of good practices, which do not provide insights on common and different characteristics and trends of universities’ contribution to sustainable development. This is the result of the early stage of development of the reporting about universities’ sustainable efforts what limits possibilities to carry quantitative analysis. The paper aims, first, to search for characteristics of universities’ contribution to sustainable development and, second, to detect trends by using numerical secondary data worked up in UI GreenMetric World University Ranking. The paper focuses on universities from European Union. Special attention is devoted to countries’ economic development level as far as scientific literature suggests that the level of economic development may affect involvement in sustainable development. Research findings allows to indicate that there are both common and distinct characteristics across the cases from economically high and less developed countries what is significant for further policy-making and popularizing of sustainability idea across universities in the European Union. Universities continue to improve practices and search for new accents. However, universities’ intention to report about their sustainable efforts in long-term perspective for continuing data collection must be more active.