FW: How efforts to assess university contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals fall short | Impact of Social Sciences

[Glenn Hampson]

"In our efforts to better 'measure what matters' in higher education, attention increasingly turns to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a way to define 'what matters' and to frame assessments accordingly. Many institutions are embedding the SDGs in their strategies and turning to the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings (based on the SDGs) as a Key Performance Indicator."

OSIer Lizzy Gadd has some problems with this whole idea. Here's one: "The real irony around the use of bibliometric data in SDG assessments is that the main data sources used are hugely biased towards to the global north. Indeed, journals from the 'global south' in Elsevier's Scopus are outnumbered six-to-one by those based in the 'global north'. Deeply ironic given SDG 10's call for reducing inequality. Some of the THE Impact Rankings' indicators are equally problematic. Such as, allocating points to institutions for having "targets to admit students who fall into the bottom 20% of household income in the country", when in some countries those in the bottom 20% are barely finishing primary school."

Lizzie's full article is at https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2024/01/24/how-efforts-to-assess-university-contributions-to-the-sustainable-development-goals-fall-short/

(Thanks for "discovering" this article Simon!)