Students Perceptions of Sustainable Universities in Hungary. An Importance-Performance Analysis

TL;DR

This study assesses Hungarian students' perceptions of university sustainability, identifying key areas for improvement and highlighting the current performance gaps in sustainability efforts within Hungarian higher education institutions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combined approach using a sustainable university scale and importance-performance analysis to evaluate student perceptions of sustainability.

Findings

Hungarian universities are perceived as unsustainable by students.

Poor performance in sustainable purchasing and renewable energy use.

Location and waste collection are major strengths.

Abstract

In order to succeed, universities are forced to respond to the new challenges in the rapidly changing world. The recently emerging fourth-generation universities should meet sustainability objectives to better serve their students and their communities. It is essential for universities to measure their sustainability performance to capitalise on their core strengths and to overcome their weaknesses. In line with the stakeholder theory, the objective of this study was to investigate students perceptions of university sustainability including their expectations about and satisfaction with the efforts that universities make towards sustainability. This paper proposes a new approach that combines the sustainable university scale, developed by the authors, with the importance-performance analysis to identify key areas of university sustainability. To collect data, an online survey was conducted in Hungary in 2019. The sustainable university scale was found to be a reliable construct to measure different aspects of university sustainability. Results of the importance-performance analysis suggest that students consider Hungarian universities unsustainable. Research findings indicate that Hungarian universities perform poorly in sustainable purchasing and renewable energy use, but their location and their efforts towards separate waste collection are their major competitive advantages. The main domains of university sustainability were also discussed. This study provides university decision-makers and researchers with insightful results supporting the transformation of traditional universities into sustainable, fourth-generation higher education institutions.