Giving Compass' Take:

• Times Higher Education created a tool that now ranks higher education institutions based on social impact informed by the SDG framework.

• How will this addition of social impact rankings help higher education systems to change? 

•  Read about social impact partnerships in higher education. 

Times Higher Education has been producing university rankings since 2004, both to comment on the higher education sector and to serve as as an advocate for it, and in 2017, we began developing a set of university rankings based on the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated not only our planet’s interconnected nature but the urgency of building sustainability, and the 17 interlinked SDGs serve as a road map toward a more sustainable, resilient future. All elements of society need to play their part, and we believe that higher education is well-positioned to demonstrate its relevance to society by placing the SDGs at the center of best practices.

By bringing together sustainability and higher education, we believe we can both demonstrate the progress that universities are making and support them in moving more quickly and effectively toward delivering on the goals. We’ve been in the business of ranking universities for a while, but as we’ve learned how to collect and analyze data over almost two decades, we’ve also learned how influential these rankings can be. We realized we had an opportunity to leverage our core competence in rankings as a strategic lever in the field of higher education, to fashion something new and evaluate a different kind of game: social impact.

Our World University Rankings now cover 1,397 universities from 92 countries; tens of millions of students access our website to read them; and billions will come across stories that refer to the ranking. Because university leadership take them seriously, as do governments and individuals, we had an opportunity to create a new ranking that looked directly at how higher education worked in society, that would be more open to the wide range of universities across the world, and that would drive positive behavior.

Read the full article about university rankings for social impact by Duncan Ross at Stanford Social Innovation Review.