SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY OF HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS: YOUTH ATTITUDE

Social Responsibility in the higher education institutions encourages ethical approaches, develop a sense of civil citizenship by encouraging the students and the academic and administrative staff to provide social services to their local community, promote ecological or environmental commitment for local and global sustainable development and so on. Such practices are very important in today's world, where organizations strive to act as socially responsible and at least partially contribute to sustainable development. In the article we raise problematic questions: How do young people understand social responsibility? How studies of social responsibility subject impact young students' attitude towards corporate social responsibility (further - CSR)? How does a higher education institution implement socially responsible initiatives in their activities? What is the main benefit of a social responsibility? The aim of the research is to investigate the attitude of youth to social responsibility of higher education institutions. Quantitative research and data processing methods were applied in the empirical research. In this survey participated 356 respondents from two higher education institutions (College and University). The collected empirical data were processed using the SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) programme. The research respondents indicate that social responsibility manifest as a part of business companies' activity, the phenomenon of society and part of public / governmental institutions activity. The evaluation of social responsibility implementation in institutions of higher education revealed that main attention is given to employee well-being, focus on environment area and intolerance for bribery, rust of any corruption. Mostly respondents think that publication of social initiatives strengthen higher education institutions image and reputations, increase its authority, and creates a stronger organizational culture. Comparison of attitudes of respondents, who have studied the subject of social responsibility, and respondents, who had not studied such subject, indicated the benefits of social responsibility studies by revealing the wider respondents awareness of impact of social responsibility implementation.