Ranking of Higher Education Institutions Quality: Path Towards Measurable Quality Monitoring for Sustainable Development

An inclusive and equitable quality education and the promotion of lifelong learning opportunities are critical factors in ensuring sustainable development. While guidelines and recommendations towards Sustainable Development Goal 4 are available, practical implementations usually face challenges in measuring success and progress. Measuring education quality is important not only to identify the best practices, but also to monitor the effectiveness of some measures. To evaluate higher education institutions' quality and progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 4, a data-driven multi-criteria model is proposed. It incorporates more than 200 monitoring data points from institutions to get the aggregated quality score, illustrating the ranking among compared institutions. The model was tested on four higher education institutions located in the European Union (three universities from all Baltic states and one from Spain). The performed research indicated that all four analyzed higher education institutions have to take a path towards increasing the data-driven operation maturity level, and that the proposed model is suitable to rank the institutions and indicate leading and lagging ones in specific areas. With the help of the model, different higher education institutions improvement plans were developed to support the objectives of the MERIT project (co-funded by the European Union) and promote the European Pillars of Social Rights in analyzed universities.