Publication Details
Abstract
Sustainability-focused university rankings differ from conventional league tables in one decisive respect: participation is voluntary and selective, so published results reflect institutional reporting behavior as much as institutional performance. This study examines how Uzbekistan’s higher education system responded to the Times Higher Education (THE) Sustainability Impact Ratings 2026, in which the overall score is built from a fixed effective structure: SDG 17 (22%) plus each institution’s three strongest SDGs (26% each). A complete national participation matrix was compiled for all 50 ranked Uzbek institutions across all 17 SDG tables (471 filled observations of 850 possible cells) and validated in three independent steps. Although 90% of institutions reported performance in more than four SDGs, participation beyond the effective scoring structure was not associated with higher ranking performance: excess participation showed no significant correlation with best rank achieved, with top-100 entries, or with the mean of each institution’s three strongest results. By contrast, an entropy-based concentration index of results was strongly associated with all three outcome measures (Spearman’s rho = -0.824, +0.713, and -0.657, respectively; all p < 0.001), and the associations survived ordinal recoding and leave-best-out robustness checks. In total, 57.5% of reported SDG participation fell outside the effective scoring structure, and only 8 of the country’s 24 top-100 results appeared in the official ministerial announcement. The findings indicate that international visibility in this rating rewards concentration rather than breadth, and that reading the design of a ranking metric is itself a component of institutional strategic capacity.