Sustainability Assessment in Higher Education: Suitable Model in the Case of Islamic Azad University

Sustainability in higher education is a relatively new domain in research areas. This way, the researchers of the sustainability in higher education have been encouraged to have a closer examination of the innovations of sustainability in universities. This research, being practical in its aim and descriptive-analytic in methodology, was conducted in Islamic Azad University with the aim of recognizing the components and providing feasible patterns for sustainability examination. To this end, a certain number of components were initially obtained through an investigation of national and international experience, the five-year program and the Document of Future Perspective for Islamic Azad University and then the views of the experts were asked as to what extent the aforementioned components were appropriate. This was carried out through Delphi method and at last the components were finalized. The statistical population consisted of 30 individuals who were the experts of higher education and development. Consequently, 14 main components and 75 Sub-components were designed to be the groundwork for the examination means of sustainability which in turn was performed in form of questionnaires to investigate the present status of Islamic Azad University. The present study has been conducted in one of the major branches of Islamic Azad University and the results showed that the respondents were not satisfied with components number 1 to 10 and 13 and the components number 11 and 14 were relatively satisfactory.