Social Impact through the SDGs: Case Studies in Higher Education

Abstract

Since the approval of the SDGs by the United Nations in 2015, public and private institutions worldwide have been working to meet the global goals identified in the 17 SDGs. This research is based on the analysis of the contribution of universities in Spain on these challenges to promote sustainability considering public information from international rankings. Following this, the main objective of this chapter is i) to understand how universities generate social impact, ii) how rankings measure the impact on SDGs through the university activities involving their stakeholders, and iii) how these actions affect people and society. The results, based on the scores from The Higher Education Ranking 2022, show that the best performance in Spanish Universities is related to the SDG 3, SDG 4, SDG 5, SDG 7, SDG 8, SDG 11, SDG 16, and SDG 17. In addition, the success of an educational project for social inclusion is presented (SDG 4), where the capacity of universities to generate social impact is shown through an original program using a higher educational method and created for people at risk of exclusion, in order to increase their employability.