The social impact of universities: assessing the effects of the three university missions on social engagement

ABSTRACT

Whereas the economic impact of universities is undisputed, the social impact of universities remains vague. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how universities influence firms’ social engagement. Based on survey data of more than 7,000 German firms, our results reveal that universities positively affect firms’ social engagement mainly through teaching activities. Hence, our findings give impetus to a reinforcement of the university mission ‘teaching’ as a central lever for social change and increased social awareness as well as to a reorientation of the third university mission toward social needs. This paper thereby contributes to our understanding of the changing missions and values of universities and adds to the literature by exploring the underlying mechanisms of the social impact of universities. We conclude the paper with fruitful future avenues of research.

KEYWORDS:

• Social impact
• social innovation
• social engagement
• university
• university mission
• third mission

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All answers from the CC survey were normalized to a minimum value of zero and a maximum value of three. Zero reflects the lowest possible score for social engagement, and three reflects the highest possible score. We then calculated the average of each variable over all firms in a region. The indices subsequently represent the mean of the averages of all variables belonging to the corresponding index. Consequently, the index also ranges from zero to three, where zero reflects the lowest and three the highest possible score. Appendix 2 provides a more detailed explanation of the creation of the indices.

2 Regional planning areas are large, functionally delimited spatial units for federal spatial planning reporting. They are made up of German NUTS 3 regions but are smaller than NUTS 2 regions. There are 96 RORs in Germany, which are all covered by our data.

3 We use the classification of ‘Web of Science’ that takes the field and the age of the paper into account.