Sustainability Without Prestige? The Rise of UI GreenMetric and the Persistent Decoupling from Global University Rankings (2010–2025)

Universities are fundamental to transitions towards sustainability, but academic pres-tige is still primarily shaped by overall rankings. This study assesses whether sustaina-bility leadership is becoming associated with academic prestige and, for this assess-ment, analyzes the UI GreenMetric World University Rankings (2010–2025) and its overlap with the QS World University Rankings (QS WUR) and Times Higher Educa-tion World University Rankings (THE WUR) Top 100; triangulation utilizes THE Im-pact (2019–2025) and QS Sustainability (2023–2025). A longitudinal institution-year panel was constructed and analyzed based on Top 100/Top 10 participation, Borda points, Jaccard stability, and conditional access risk (RR) indices. Participation in-creased from 95 institutions (2010) to 1,745 (2025), with the Global South representing 90% of participants in 2025. Although the South occupied more positions in the Top 100 in 2025 (63 vs. 37), conditional access to the Top 100 remained unequal (21.1% North vs. 4% South; RR = 5.27), and the Top 10 was dominated by the North (9 vs. 1). The stability of the Top 100 increased (Jaccard 0.33 in 2010–2011 to 0.86 in 2023–2024), while overlap with the overall Top 100 remained minimal in 2025 (three institutions with QS WUR ranking and three with THE WUR ranking). Overall, sustainability ap-pears institutionalized in GreenMetric participation and elite stability, but remains weakly associated with conventional academic prestige, suggesting a limited align-ment of incentives in higher education.