Reflection of new academic missions in the strategic plans of universities around the world: A co-word mapping

Purpose: In recent decades, higher education has increasingly faced pressures to tackle real-world challenges in social, economic, environmental, and technological realms. The literature revealed that the universities have been expanding the traditional “science for science” to encompass new missions. They differed in their responses to the demands depending on their regulations and social conditions. Some universities showed strong local or regional orientations, a number expanded their activities to become international actors, and others adjusted their internal procedures to evolve to new administrative methods or turn into entrepreneurial universities. Accordingly, the literature provides evidence of the positive response from universities, though scattered and not on a global scale.
As strategic plans provide managerial perspectives and operational frameworks for achieving organizational goals and missions, their content can be analyzed to study university reactions to the demands. Using a quantitative content analysis method, the present study analyzed the strategic plans of the world's universities, to explore their approaches to new academic missions, the novel subjects that have recently appeared in the plans, and their relatedness to the mother countries’ development levels.
Methodology: The research sample included the world universities' strategic plans accessible on the Web. The world universities were first identified using the list of the universities ranked by the Scimago Institutions and University Rankings. It included 4126 universities at the time of data collection in May 2022. By searching the following formula in the title field of documents indexed in Google, the strategic plan of each university was identified and its full text was downloaded:
("strategic plan" OR "strategic plans" OR "strategic planning" OR "Strategic * plan" OR "action plan" OR "action plans" OR "action planning" OR strategy OR vision OR mission OR values) AND [The name of the university]
852 and 104 strategic plans in English and non-English languages were retrieved. They were either in text or image formats. The non-English strategic plans were translated by Google translator, and the image files were converted into text using Google Docs. The full texts of the strategic plans were then entered as plain text into VoSViewer software, version 1.6.19, and their co-word maps were analyzed after linguistic pre-processing. A thesaurus was developed and used to standardize the terms.
To identify novel subjects that recently occurred in the strategic plans, they were weighted according to the commencement year of their periods. Moreover, to explore the association between the subjects and the mother countries’ development levels, the plans were weighted by the Human Development Index and Gross Domestic Expenditure on R&D, reported by the United Nations Development Program and the World Bank, respectively. The whole counting method was used to calculate term frequencies. Also, the threshold of occurrence in at least ten strategic plans was selected for a term to enter the map. 1158 words or phrases were identified. Applying a threshold of 60% of the most relevant terms led to the inclusion of 695 terms in the final map.
Findings: Five clusters were identified including “society”, “students”, “systems”, “transformation”, and “graduate programs”. The largest cluster, i.e., “society”, included the concepts related to education, research, and innovation. The terms “society” and “world” were respectively the biggest nodes in this cluster, indicating the connection of these main missions with real-world challenges. In the “graduate cluster”, the “global rankings” node occurred linked to “sustainable development goals”, “international collaborations”, and “partnerships”. In the “student” cluster, “courses" was the second largest node. Along with the terms related to classic academic missions (i.e., “students”, “graduate programs”, and “courses”), the terms related to new academic missions were observed including “communities”, “world”, “economy”, “sustainable development”, “economic growth”, “social growth”, “excellence”, “solutions”, “diversity”, “climate”, and “climate change”. The terms’ occurrences showed dependence on the plans’ novelty and country development level. For example, the terms “communities”, “social enterprises”, “sustainability”, “global rankings”, “sustainable development goals”, “web applications”, and “circular economy” occurred for moderately to highly developed countries.
Conclusion: universities worldwide have expanded their focus beyond classic missions to include new ones involving the economy, society, and environment. The dependence of the terms on the countries’ development levels underscores the importance of pragmatic policymaking to establish feasible short- and long-term objectives. Moreover, it warns against the probability of exacerbating nations’ divides due to divergent goals set for higher education. Particularly, the absence of terms related to research quantity and classic-mission-oriented ranking systems challenges the “ranking for ranking” approach.