Quality of Higher Education Institutions – International Rankings, Responses to Social Challenges and the SDG

Are Higher Education Institutions (HEI) satisfactorily answering to the challenges faced by their encompassing societies? Are their quality assessment systems conducive to a continuous improvement in fulfilling their vision and mission, and responding to their various stakeholders? What are HEIs contributions and challenges, vis-à-vis the adoption of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)? These questions reinforce discussions on SDGs’ influence and impact as key evaluation criteria for addressing social challenges in higher education. It has been common practice, when evaluating HEIs quality, to rely on their positioning according to Global University Rankings (GUR), as they seemingly provide an effective and credible assessment. However, full integration of principles required by the rankings with strategic guidelines indicated by the SDG is a topic that necessitates a more in-depth discussion in HE. We analyzed the strategies of ten HEIs that have consistently ranked in the top positions in four of the most important GURs over a ten-year period (2014-2023). The results suggest that: 1) the current challenges they predominantly engage with fall within the areas of Sustainability, DEI, Internationalization, and Outreach; 2) a paradigm shift is occurring in GURs towards better alignment with the SDG; 3) HEIs have been adjusting their quality systems to remain at the forefront of specific rankings, contributing rather slowly to the dissemination of the SDG. This study constitutes a reflection on the quality of HEI, beyond the traditional evaluation criteria established by the rankings, while simultaneously confronting them constructively in the face of societal challenges, posed from the perspective of the SDGs.