What Are Impact Rankings?
Times Higher Education Rankings Impact Rankings, launched in 2019, represent the most significant innovation in university evaluation in the past decade. Unlike conventional rankings that measure research prestige and teaching resources, Impact Rankings evaluate universities' contributions to the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — the global framework for addressing poverty, inequality, climate change, peace, and justice by 2030.
The premise is straightforward but radical: universities have obligations to society that go beyond training researchers and producing citations. They are among the largest employers in many cities, major purchasers of goods and services, significant landowners, and influential voices in public discourse. How they manage their own operations — their carbon footprint, their employment practices, their investment portfolios — matters alongside what they research and teach.
Impact Rankings produce a completely different league table from THE's standard World University Rankings. Universities outside the global research elite — community-engaged institutions, universities in lower-income countries focused on local development challenges, teaching-intensive universities with strong social missions — regularly appear in Impact Rankings' top 100 while ranking far lower in THE's standard publication. This is not a failure of Impact Rankings; it is precisely the point.
UN Sustainable Development Goals Framework
The 17 SDGs adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015 range from No Poverty (SDG 1) to Partnerships for the Goals (SDG 17). They represent international consensus on humanity's most pressing collective challenges. THE's Impact Rankings assess universities against all 17 goals, with each SDG evaluated through indicators tailored to what universities can realistically contribute.
Universities participate in Impact Rankings by submitting data against the SDGs they wish to be evaluated on. They must submit data for SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals) and at least three other SDGs to receive an overall score. Universities may choose which additional SDGs to report on, which means their overall score reflects both their actual SDG performance and their strategic choice of which goals to highlight — a methodological limitation worth noting.
Research Output related to each SDG is one of the three measurement dimensions, but it is not the only one. Stewardship (how the university manages its own operations relevant to the goal) and Outreach (how the university engages with external stakeholders and communities) count equally, making Impact Rankings genuinely different from research-output-centric conventional rankings.
Methodology: Research, Stewardship, Outreach
For each SDG, THE measures three dimensions:
- Research (approximately 27% of each SDG score): The volume and citation impact of publications related to the SDG's themes, measured through Elsevier's Scopus database using curated keyword sets. Interdisciplinary Research is particularly valued here — many SDG challenges require research that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries.
- Stewardship (approximately 47% of each SDG score): Institutional policies and practices relevant to the SDG. For SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), this might include the university's renewable energy commitments, its energy consumption per student, and its investment policy on fossil fuel companies. For SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), it might include health service provision for students and staff. Stewardship data is self-reported by universities against standardised questions.
- Outreach (approximately 27% of each SDG score): How the university engages external communities in each SDG area — through free public access to research, technology transfer, community health clinics, legal aid programs, or other activities that apply university expertise to real-world challenges beyond its own campus.
The overall score is a weighted average across all SDGs for which a university submits data, with SDG 17 carrying a fixed 22% weight and each of the three other mandatory SDGs sharing the remaining 78%.
Top Universities by Impact Category
Because universities choose which SDGs to report on, the ranking fragments into 17 separate sub-rankings — and different institutions dominate different goals. Some patterns from recent editions:
- SDG 3 (Good Health): Universities with major medical schools and public health programs tend to perform well — institutions like University of Auckland, La Trobe University (Australia), and RMIT University have all appeared in top positions.
- SDG 4 (Quality Education): Institutions with strong teacher training programs, open educational resources, and commitments to access and widening participation score well. University of Sydney and Durham University have been frequent leaders.
- SDG 13 (Climate Action): Universities with strong environmental science programs and aggressive campus sustainability targets — including several European and Australian institutions — regularly lead this category.
- Overall Impact: University of Manchester, Aalto University (Finland), and several Australian universities have led overall Impact Rankings in recent years. None are in the top 20 of THE World University Rankings.
Climate Action and Environment
SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 14 (Life Below Water), and SDG 15 (Life on Land) together represent a significant cluster of environmental goals where universities can make meaningful contributions through both research and stewardship. Universities with strong environmental science programs that also commit to ambitious campus decarbonisation targets can score exceptionally on these goals.
Several universities have received media attention for committing to carbon neutrality or divesting from fossil fuel investments — commitments that directly improve their stewardship scores in climate-related SDGs. However, THE audits these commitments through the data universities submit; greenwashing commitments without underlying data support should, in principle, be detected. In practice, the reliance on self-reported stewardship data creates some vulnerability to strategic over-reporting.
Reducing Inequalities
SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) is one of the most interesting SDG rankings because it rewards universities for reducing barriers to education within their own institutions as much as for researching inequality externally. Indicators include data on pay equity between genders and between different staff categories, policies on employment of disadvantaged groups, and whether the university offers programs specifically designed to improve access for underrepresented students.
This dimension is notable because it directly measures whether a university practices what it may research and preach about inequality — a form of accountability that conventional research rankings entirely ignore.
Criticisms of Impact Rankings
Despite their innovation, Impact Rankings face significant methodological criticism:
- Self-selection bias: Universities choose which SDGs to report on. A university with poor environmental performance can simply opt not to report SDG 13, while a university with genuinely strong environmental credentials reports it prominently. This makes comparison across universities with different SDG portfolios challenging.
- Self-reported stewardship data: Unlike bibliometric data, stewardship indicators rely entirely on data universities submit about their own policies. Independent verification is limited, creating opportunities for strategic data presentation.
- Variable methodology across SDGs: Different SDGs are measured with different levels of methodological rigour, making the overall score a somewhat heterogeneous composite.
- Gaming concern: As Impact Rankings become more visible, universities have incentives to optimise for them — creating new "sustainability" research centres, announcing investment policy changes, or generating SDG-keyword-matching publications — in ways that may improve scores without genuinely advancing sustainable development.
These limitations don't invalidate Impact Rankings, but they should prompt users to read them alongside the detailed methodology documentation rather than treating overall positions as definitive assessments of institutional social responsibility.