Beyond the Green Campus: Conceptual Design of an Integrated Model for Assessing and Steering the Sustainability Transformation of Higher Education Institutions

Sustainability assessment in higher education has proliferated into rating systems that rank institutions but give managers little basis for steering. This article reviews how higher education institutions’ sustainability is assessed and presents the conceptual design of an integrated, system-based model intended to close the coverage and measurement gaps of existing tools. Following PRISMA 2020, 439 Scopus and Web of Science records were screened to 77 included studies; 22 instruments were deep-extracted on a common schema. Existing instruments concentrate on campus operations and teaching; under-represent the third mission, governance, digital transformation and organizational resilience; and rely on self-reported data with static weighting. In response, the proposed model crosses three sustainability dimensions with three system components: a 3 × 3 architecture operationalized through a pool of auditable candidate parameters mapped to the Sustainable Development Goals, pairing dual fact–perception measurement and an alignment score with phase-sensitive weighting. By scoring digital transformation, organizational resilience and the third mission, the model treats sustainability as an institutional transformation rather than a property of the campus. The design is conceptually derived and not yet empirically validated. Content validation, psychometric testing and sensitivity analysis are the specified next steps. The model is then intended to give university management an auditable, comparable and developmentally realistic basis for steering rather than ranking.