  In order to succeed, universities are forced to respond to the new challenges
in the rapidly changing world. The recently emerging fourth-generation
universities should meet sustainability objectives to better serve their
students and their communities. It is essential for universities to measure
their sustainability performance to capitalise on their core strengths and to
overcome their weaknesses. In line with the stakeholder theory, the objective
of this study was to investigate students perceptions of university
sustainability including their expectations about and satisfaction with the
efforts that universities make towards sustainability. This paper proposes a
new approach that combines the sustainable university scale, developed by the
authors, with the importance-performance analysis to identify key areas of
university sustainability. To collect data, an online survey was conducted in
Hungary in 2019. The sustainable university scale was found to be a reliable
construct to measure different aspects of university sustainability. Results of
the importance-performance analysis suggest that students consider Hungarian
universities unsustainable. Research findings indicate that Hungarian
universities perform poorly in sustainable purchasing and renewable energy use,
but their location and their efforts towards separate waste collection are
their major competitive advantages. The main domains of university
sustainability were also discussed. This study provides university
decision-makers and researchers with insightful results supporting the
transformation of traditional universities into sustainable, fourth-generation
higher education institutions.
