breaking latest news – Programming based on the capacity of universities, safeguarding training quality and places calculated on medium-term needs by the Ministry of Health and the Regions.
This is the rationale behind it the choice of ‘limited number’ access for Medicine and for scientific facultieseven if this year the debate on the need to make access free was reopened on time, a theme that was also ridden in the electoral campaign.
The controversy is renewed today, the day in which over 65 thousand candidates are grappling with the test to access degree courses in medicine and surgery and dentistrybut with just 15,876 places available.
Not a small disparity but, as the Ministry of University and Research recall, the path traced takes into account many factors such as the ability of universities to be able to accommodate a certain number of students and also to be able to ensure adequate training, in addition to planning on the medium-term needs of doctors and trainees in about ten years.
The same minister Mass a few days ago in an interview with Skuola.net explained: “We don’t have the strength to be able to train all these doctors. So, either you stop them in the first year or you stop them even before they start.”
In the university world, not everyone agrees, however. The same rectors are in different positions even if the president of the Crui (Italian University Rectors Conference) and rector of the Politecnico di Milano, Ferruccio Resta, claims: “On the Medicine test we went from 9,000 to 15,000 seats in 4 years, creating growth governed and planned numbers, because otherwise we do not govern and respond to emergencies with something that then creates problems in the long term “.
Numbers claimed also by the same minister who always reminded Skuola.net: “We have increased the number of registrations. Today we have reached about 15-16 thousand places in Medicine, compared to 9 thousand of a few years ago there is a big difference” .
While the students – today the Udu, the Union of university students, has organized a protest garrison at Sapienza – hurl themselves against the closed number calling it illegitimate, and against “the fallacy of the access test tool”.
And they point the finger: “Despite the slight changes made to the test structure – the students observe – the limited number remains: a clear sign of how much investments in education and universities and research are only electoral promises and commercial phrases. By the way, the latest statements by Salvini who affirms his will to overcome the limited number overnight without proposing a model from which to start, nor indicate a program of structural investments that can really guarantee this “. Therefore, they are asking for a University that is “public, open and accessible to all and all”.
In fact, the Minister of Mass has changed the modalities of the quizzes to meet the demands of the students, therefore fewer questions of various general culture and more targeted questions.
But since when does the limited number exist? It was introduced by law, the Consulcesi website recalls, in 1987 through a special decree by the then Minister of Education, University and Research, Ortensio Zecchino.
A turning point not only for Medicine, but for most of the faculties of a scientific nature, which sanctioned the principle of relationship between the number of students and the capacity of the individual structures to host them, the availability of professors, the possibility of carrying out workshops and lessons.
However, not everything went smoothly as it should have – underlines Consulcesi – in fact, there were numerous appeals. So that it had to arrive in 1999 for this ministerial decree to become law with the ok of the Constitutional Court in 2013after the Council of State had raised the question of its legitimacy.
The issue today is even hotter after the two pandemic years that highlighted the lack of doctors with the need, often, to have recourse to already retired doctors.
After the next elections, on 25 September, a new government will be born and it will be seen if the successor of the current minister, Maria Cristina Messa, will remain in the wake of the closed number and planning or if there will be a ‘free all’.