Abstract
Abstract. 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.
Highlights
The tertiary education system represents a strategic asset for the growth of every nation: it qualifies human capital and promotes the dissemination of knowledge, feeds technological innovation, and facilitates social mobility, increases the competitiveness of the country system and the levels of income of its citizens
Revisiting the taxonomy developed by the EUA Public Funding Observatory (2017) for the European countries, we propose a classification of Italian regional tertiary education systems in 6 different types
Policy choices regarding tertiary education have induced in the last decade a large contraction in the size of the whole university system and its geographical polarization, in the presence of already large and lasting disparities in comparison to other countries in the European Union and in the OECD area
Summary
The tertiary education system represents a strategic asset for the growth of every nation: it qualifies human capital and promotes the dissemination of knowledge, feeds technological innovation, and facilitates social mobility, increases the competitiveness of the country system and the levels of income of its citizens. The most attractive and performing universities were rewarded, without taking into account (or limitedly considering) the cultural and family background of students, the dynamism of the local labor market, the provision of urban services, income levels and university fees, the ability to mobilize public and private financial resources and so on. All these context variables inevitably affect the attractiveness and performance of the various institutions, benefiting those located in the richest and most dynamic regions. The paper is organized as follows: paragraph 2 looks at the Italian university system in a comparative perspective; paragraph 3 deals with the issue of internal territorial disparities of the system in terms of students, financial resources, academic staff, student mobility; a classification of regional university systems is
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