IMPACT OF REPUTATION ON THE SUSTAINABILITY IN BRITISH HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Higher education has undergone major changes from the origin of universities in the Middle Ages to the recent European reform known as the Bologna Plan. Nowadays, universities of the European Union and the rest of the world compete to attract the best teachers, the best students and the largest possible number of funds to fund research projects.

The main goal of this investigation is to analyze the influence of the reputation of British universities on sustainability performance of them measured through a sustainability index on environmental and ethical issues. For that, to build our sample, we have taken the British universities that were included in the People and Planet’s University Rankings which were published in 2016 and 2015. In this sense, we have got a sample of 150 British universities during two continuous academic years, 2013-2014 (publication in 2015) and 2014-2015 (publication in 2016), resulting in a balanced panel of 300 observations (150 universities x 2 years). To analyse our main goal, ordinary least squares model (OLS) and fixed and random effects have been applied.

Our findings present that the reputation of British universities has a positive and significant impact on sustainability performance of them. These results suggest that universities should take into account the influence that reputation perform on the development of university sustainability.