How exactly do you rank universities, anyway? There has never been an easy answer to this question, and you probably shouldn’t expect one anytime soon. One of the problems, of course, is that each student has a different way of evaluating universities. Some prioritise a job afterwards. Others prefer to focus on student experience. And many see it as a way to meet new people and expand their horizons. Each perspective is equally valid.
But new ways of evaluating universities are always emerging. Nowadays, students aren’t just looking for a university that’ll provide them with a solid career and well-paid job. Now, they also want an institution that shares their values and will give them greater meaning in life. One way of judging that is through a school’s commitment to sustainability.
The QS Sustainability Ranking is part of a new wave of rankings that aims to measure that commitment. Now in its third year, it ranks universities based on their environmental impact, social impact and governance. It flips the script on traditional measures, reflecting what students are looking for in 2025 and beyond.
“Our sustainability ranking was born out of the research we've been doing with students over a number of years,” explains Leigh Kamolins, Director of Analytics and Evaluation at QS. “We found that students are starting to look into what universities and business schools are doing, to make sure they're going somewhere that is making some sort of positive impact on the world. This was the background to why we created a sustainability ranking.”
This year’s ranking is the biggest yet, with 1,400 universities taking part - up from 700 in the first edition. Kamolins says that it is the ‘most complex’ that QS does. The environmental component of the ranking is made up of three main lenses: education, research and sustainability. Some of the most important indicators include the school’s volume of green-focused research, their reputation for sustainable education and the impact of alumni in the environmental sector.
But it’s not just QS who are placing a greater focus on measures like these. In 2019, Times Higher Education (THE) launched their University Impact Ranking, which measures schools against the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Meanwhile, the Financial Times have incorporated a range of sustainability indicators into their business schools rankings in recent years. Schools are now judged on whether they’ve set a net zero target, whether they’ve had a recent carbon audit, how much ESG content is taught within curriculums, and how closely aligned faculty research is with the UN SDGs.
The Financial Times’ Global Business Education Editor Andrew Jack agrees that sustainability is a growing concern for students - and that is now being reflected in the rankings. "Certainly, an awful lot of students are increasingly focused on societal impact and values in what they want to study and where they want to work afterwards,” he explains. “And on the business school side of things they're probably the biggest demander of change.”
It’s a sentiment backed up by statistics. According to the 2024 GMAC Prospective Students Survey, 68 percent of prospective business school students say the sustainability of an institution is important to them, whilst 36 percent of those students say they wouldn't consider a school that doesn't prioritise sustainability.
Away from the major providers, a number of standalone sustainability rankings have also started to emerge. Like the QS Sustainability Ranking, they eschew traditional indicators and rank schools based on modern student concerns.
The Corporate Knights Better World MBA ranking is one of the oldest, having first been published in 2004. Their methodology is fairly straightforward: it measures the proportion of sustainability courses embedded within an MBA programme. In 2024 an extra indicator measuring alumni impact in the environmental sector was added, though this doesn’t affect the final ranking.
The latest to appear is the Positive Impact Rating, which was launched in 2020. Intriguingly, it doesn’t rank business schools in numerical order. Instead, schools are grouped into different tiers of societal impact. This lessens the impact that small changes make to a ranking and could represent an interesting route forward for traditional university rankings.
On the face of it, this all sounds very straightforward. Students want to assess schools based on their environmental credentials, and these rankings are giving them a chance to do it. The problem? Assessing a school’s green credentials is much easier said than done.
"It requires a balance between what is and what isn't possible to measure,” says Kamolins, adding that it’s often necessary to cross-check a school’s claims using multiple sources. "Is what they're reporting to us consistent with what we're finding in other databases? If what they're claiming is inconsistent, we always seek some sort of evidence to support their claims."
