A recently published article in the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal (Minutolo, Ivanova, & Cong, M. 2021: Signaling sustainability: impact that learning how to report has on enrollment, endowment and emissions of North American higher education institutions) has found that using STARS as a reporting framework results in improved institutional performance:
In summary, the results from this study suggest that STARS reporting and STARS score have a positive impact on reputation (enrollment), finances (endowments) and environmental performance (emissions) of the HEIs.