Modelling of university economic sustainability

Abstract

The doctoral dissertation examines university activity at sustainable economic development. The analysis of scientific literature reveals that the sustainable development of universities is mostly explored by scientific works at the macro level. The quality of higher education is another topic that is widely discussed by researchers. There is a lack of scientific works that examine the possibility for universities to strive for sustainable development at the institutional level. This dissertation addresses the need to create a model that would help universities to move towards sustainable economic development. The research object is the economic sustainability of the university. The aim of the dissertation is to create a model of university economic sustainability and to assess the impact of areas of the university activity on the economic sustainability of the university. The main objectives of the thesis are as follows: to analyse scientific literature on the practical implementation of the concept of sustainable development at universities; to examine the relationship between the quality management of university activities and the concepts of sustainable development from a theoretical perspective; to exemine the complexity of the university's economic sustainability by analyzing the university processes and the diversity of stakeholdres surrounding the university and to perform the economic substantiation of the complexity of the university's activities; to assess the relationship between the quality of the study process at the university and the concept of sustainable development to design the theoretical model for the comprehensive assessment of the study process at the university to make an economic validation of university’s activities; to develop an algorithm for the comprehensive quality assessment system for the study process at the university with reference to theoretical simulation using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, and to verify the suitability of the comprehensive quality assessment model for the study process at the university regarding the examples of Lithuanian and foreign universities. This dissertation is composed of an introduction, three chapters, general conclusions, a references list, a list of scientific publications, and appendices. The first chapter explores the scientific background in the field of the theoretical concept of university economic sustainability. The second chapter explains the comprehensiveness of university activities and composes the model of comprehensive assessment of the university-level higher education study process. The third chapter discusses the empirical research and findings at Lithuanian and foreign universities. Five articles on the dissertation’s subject were published: one in scientific journal included in the publications of the Clarivate Analytics database, three in a publications of other international databases, one in peer-reviewed international conference proceedings. The findings of the doctoral thesis were presented in two international scientific conferences.