Differences in the academic performance of Italian Universities - exploring the relationship with market and public policies (original) (raw)
Related papers
A U T H Waiting for the Market: Where is the Italian University System Heading
This paper analyses the factors limiting marketisation in Italian higher education. The analysis was conducted by adopting Jongbloed's framework. Using empirical data on the Italian higher education system, it is shown that only a small amount of funds are allocated to Italian universities based on market mechanisms. The analysis shows that the development of the market has been limited by two different factors. On the provider side, university behaviour is restricted by strict legislation whereas on the consumer side, market impacts are limited because of cultural and environmental factors.
Drivers of inequalities in Higher Education and the unexpected consequences of equality policies
2011
"The main argument of this paper is that Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) perform differently and policies that do not consider differences across HEIs are likely to increase inequalities. We test the hypothesis by analysing the case of Italian Universities and by using indicators of research quality. We find deep inequalities in research performance, which are strongly correlated to geographic location. Moreover, we find that inequalities cannot be explained only by the weakness of the local economic context, since they are also strongly linked to the social context and to the adoption of policy measures that that do not address the peculiar features of the HEIs and the context in which they are located. draft available below"
Waiting for the Market: Where is the Italian University System Heading?
Higher Education Policy, 2012
This paper analyses the factors limiting marketisation in Italian higher education. The analysis was conducted by adopting Jongbloed's framework. Using empirical data on the Italian higher education system, it is shown that only a small amount of funds are allocated to Italian universities based on market mechanisms. The analysis shows that the development of the market has been limited by two different factors. On the provider side, university behaviour is restricted by strict legislation whereas on the consumer side, market impacts are limited because of cultural and environmental factors.
Advances in Cartography and GIScience of the ICA
In the last decade, the tertiary education system in Italy has shrinked and a larger heterogeneity has emerged among universities located in different areas of the country, with a strong concentration of increasingly scarce resources in a narrow and geographically concentrated number of institutions. The less developed areas, such as those in Southern Italy have been hit the most, in terms of enrolled students, academic staff, financial resources, courses offered. In this work we investigate these issues by adopting a cartographic approach. We highlight these polarizing dynamics, disentangling the possible causes. We focus, particularly, on the role of new regulatory policies and the funding mechanisms based on performance indicators as producers of inequalities.
Industry and Higher Education, 2010
It is argued that in the knowledge economy and in the context of the current restrictions on public finance, matching the output of higher education with the needs of the labour market is not simply one of many key issues for policy makers addressing the sustainability of higher education: it is ‘the’ issue. As the sources of funding for universities are almost entirely domestic and, in most countries, primarily governmental, politicians are expected to ensure that increasing public investment in higher education is justified in terms of the benefits accruing to the domestic workforce and investors. In so doing, they must avoid disrupting the international, free community of scholars and students engaged in the pursuit of knowledge and, thus, destroying the historical source of wealth creation that academia represents. This article considers the current debate in Europe and recent research on the interactions between universities and labour markets. The reform of university governan...
On the Efficiency of Italian Universities: A Comment
Italian Economic Journal, 2016
Inspired by their analysis of universities' efficiency, Agasisti and Ricca (Ital Econ 2(1):57-89, 2016) on this Journal make a controversial policy proposal on the financing of private universities in Italy. We point out a number of shortcomings in their empirical analysis, interpretation of results and suggestions of policy implications. We show that Agasisti and Ricca's claims, that universities in the South and public universities are less efficient than private universities and universities in the North, do not rest on solid empirical and conceptual analysis.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2010
In the knowledge economy and current public finance constraints, matching higher education and labour market is not one of the main issues in higher education policy sustainability: it is "the issue". Being universities' sources of funding almost entirely domestic and in most countries primarily governmental, politicians are expected to ensure that the increasing public investment in higher education is justified by the fact that the benefits are captured by domestic workers and investors. In doing so they must avoid disrupting the international and free community of scholars and students pursuing knowledge, killing the goose that laid the golden eggs for so long. The European debate and frontiers of research concerning the interactions between universities and labour markets are analyzed. The much needed reform of university governance in Italy is evaluated in its premises and implications for the matching of higher education and labour market.
Higher education and equality of opportunity in Italy
2007
This paper proposes a definition of equality of educational opportunities. Then, it develops a comprehensive model that allows to test for the existence of equality of opportunity in a given distribution and to rank distributions according to equality of opportunity. Finally, it provides an empirical analysis of equality of opportunity for higher education in Italy.
Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 2017
In recent years more and more numerous are the rankings published in newspapers or technical reports available, covering many aspects of higher education, but in many cases with very conflicting results between them, due to the fact that universities' performances depend on the set of variables considered and on the methods of analysis employed. This study measures the efficiency of Italian higher education using both parametric and non-parametric techniques and uses the results to provide guidance to university managers and policymakers regarding the most appropriate method for their needs. The findings reveal that, on average and among the macro-areas of the country, the level of efficiency does not change significantly among estimation approaches, which produce different rankings, instead. This may have important implications as rankings have a strong impact on academic decision-making and behaviour, on the structure of the institutions and also on students and graduates recruiters.
Minerva, 2010
One of the unintended consequences of the New Public Management (NPM) in universities is often feared to be a division between elite institutions focused on research and large institutions with teaching missions. However, institutional isomorphisms provide counter-incentives. For example, university rankings focus on certain output parameters such as publications, but not on others (e.g., patents). In this study, we apply Gini coefficients to university rankings in order to assess whether universities are becoming more unequal, at the level of both the world and individual nations. Our results do not support the thesis that universities are becoming more unequal. If anything, we predominantly find homogenisation, both at the level of the global comparisons and nationally. In a more restricted dataset (using only publications in the natural and life sciences), we find increasing inequality for those countries, which used NPM during the 1990s, but not during the 2000s. Our findings suggest that increased output steering from the policy side leads to a global conformation to performance standards.