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 address real-world challenges in social, economic, environmental, and technological domains. The literature indicates that universities have expanded the traditional notion of science to include new missions. Their responses to these demands varied based on their regulations and social contexts. Some universities demonstrated strong local or regional orientations, while others broadened their activities to become international players. Additionally, some institutions adapted their internal procedures to embrace new administrative methods or transformed into entrepreneurial universities. Consequently, the literature provides evidence of a positive response from universities, although this response is scattered and not uniform on a global scale.As strategic plans offer managerial insights and operational frameworks for achieving organizational goals and missions, their content can be analyzed to examine university responses to various demands. This study employed a quantitative content analysis method to investigate the strategic plans of universities worldwide, exploring their approaches to new academic missions, the emerging subjects recently included in these plans and their correlation with the development levels of their respective countries.Methodology: The research sample comprised the strategic plans of universities worldwide that are accessible on the web. The universities were initially identified using the list provided by the Scimago Institutions and University Rankings, which included 4,126 universities at the time of data collection in May 2022. By employing the following formula in the title field of documents indexed in Google, the strategic plan of each university was located, 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 [University Name]852 strategic plans in both English and non-English languages were retrieved, available in either text or image formats. The non-English strategic plans were translated using Google Translate, while image files were converted into text with Google Docs. The complete texts of the strategic plans were then input as plain text into VoSViewer software, version 1.6.19, where their co-word maps were analyzed following linguistic pre-processing. A thesaurus was developed and utilized to standardize the terminology.To identify novel subjects that have recently emerged in the strategic plans, they were weighted according to the commencement year of their respective periods. Furthermore, to examine the relationship between these subjects and the development levels of their respective countries, the plans were weighted by the Human Development Index and Gross Domestic Expenditure on Research and Development, as reported by the United Nations Development Program and the World Bank, respectively. A whole counting method was employed to calculate term frequencies. Additionally, a threshold of occurrence in at least ten strategic plans was established for a term to be included in the map. A total of 1,158 words or phrases were identified. By applying a threshold of 60% of the most relevant terms, 695 terms were included 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 broadened their focus beyond traditional missions to encompass new objectives related to the economy, society, and the environment. The reliance on these terms varies according to each country's level of development, highlighting the necessity for pragmatic policymaking to establish achievable short- and long-term goals. Furthermore, this situation raises concerns about the potential to deepen divides among nations due to differing objectives set for higher education. Notably, the lack of terms associated with research output and traditional mission-oriented ranking systems poses a challenge to the for ranking's sake approach.