University Social Responsibility in United States Higher Education: A Systematic Review of a Construct Operating Under Other Names

Abstract

University Social Responsibility (USR) frames higher education institutions (HEIs) as agents of ethical, social, and environmental value creation across governance, teaching, research, and community outreach. Although the construct is well developed in Latin American and European scholarship, it is rarely named in the United States, where comparable commitments circulate under community engagement, civic engagement, service learning, engaged scholarship, campus sustainability, and the anchor-institution mission. This terminological divergence obscures U.S. practice from the international USR literature and constrains comparative learning. This systematic review, conducted and reported in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 statement, synthesises how USR is conceptualised and operationalised in U.S. HEIs under alternative labels, the institutional mechanisms that enact it, the outcomes reported, and their alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Searches of Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, and Business Source Complete/EconLit (2005–2025), supplemented by citation searching, yielded 1512 records; after duplicate removal and two-stage screening, 23 studies met the eligibility criteria. A thematic synthesis mapped the U.S. evidence onto Vallaeys’ four axes of USR impact. Findings show that U.S. HEIs enact every USR dimension, most visibly through educational and social-participation mechanisms, but under fragmented vocabularies, with the Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement functioning as a de facto USR self-assessment framework. Persistent gaps include weak faculty-reward alignment, uneven measurement, and only implicit connection to the SDGs. The review argues that reading U.S. community-engagement scholarship through a USR lens offers a shared vocabulary and a mechanism-to-outcome map for advancing Education for Sustainable Development. Limitations include construct heterogeneity and English-language, publication-biased sources.