ROMA – The Italian university movement, of Italian universities more precisely, is growing in the world. It doesn’t explode, which would be difficult to explain, by the way, but it grows. The work of the Rectors’ Conference (Crui) on international rankings, closed last December, has been made public and says some comforting things: in three years, from 2017 to 2020, 85 more national universities entered the six international rankings considered and, in the first two hundred positions, 11 more.
Well, the academic ranking in Italy is often a controversial topic. The Crui working group, led by Mirko Degli Esposti, Deputy Rector of theUniversity of Bologna, e Giulio Vidotto, coordinator of the ranking commission of theUniversity of Padua, acknowledges that the growing success of these rankings – starting in 2003, when the first one debuted, Arwu, drafted dall’Jiao Tong University of Shanghai – it is clear that these rankings, on the one hand, increasingly inspire the choices of students in the world and, on the other, intervene in the economic and educational choices of individual universities, which try to improve their performance.
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The six rankings taken into consideration are different from each other: there are those in the analysis basket who put the relationship between professors and students, those who have reputational assessments requested from the same universities, those who analyze individual departments, almost all have a reference. to publications or bibliographic indexes. They can, however, be considered the most “popular” of the fifty in the world.
Well, in the Arwu ranking in three years we have gone from 16 to 46 universities present with a growth from 2 to 3 in the top 200. In London Times Higher Education the general progression is from 39 to 49 and in the first two hundred positions there are again 3 universities compared to 2 in 2017. Qs, also this British, is the most famous ranking and here the Italian universities in three seasons have risen from 31 to 39, but in the first two hundred there has been a regression: from 3 to 2. Again, Multirank, the ranking launched by the European Commission: from 49 to 79 the Italian universities considered in this case and from 5 to 7 those entered in Band A.
Two of the six rankings are not generalist. Greenmetric, born in Indonesia, takes into account the sustainability of the individual structures: here the Italians went from 22 to 29 and in the first two hundred places from 5 they became 11. Finally, always from Qs, there is the ranking employability (the ability to produce employed and well-employed graduates): the Italian universities in this analysis refinement were 16 and 16 remain, but in the first two hundred places they go from 5 to 7.
“Few professors and not very attractive for abroad”
There are fifteen thousand universities in the world, but only a thousand enter the rankings considered. The Italians who participated in the Crui survey are 67 (out of 83). Within Qs, in a relationship with Germany, France and Spain, countries with an academic structure similar to ours, there are forty-six German, 34 Italian, 31 French and 27 Spanish universities. In the first two hundred places of the ranking, however, there are twelve Germans, 5 French and only 3 Italians and 3 Spaniards.
One of the reasons why we are falling back in excellence, it is explained, is that “the contingent of Italian university teachers is undersized compared to that of the other university systems examined,” says the report. We have few professors compared to the pupils present, and the question of financing the system returns to the center. Almost all of the Italian universities taken into consideration (32 out of 34) are over the five hundredth position in the ranking of the teacher-student ratio. “This is certainly the worst result among the university systems examined”.
A similar trend can be found in the indicators that measure the ability to attract international students and teachers: in both cases, 31 out of 34 Italian universities are positioned above the five hundredth position, recording the worst result compared to France, Germany and Spain. 17 Italian universities in the top 300 of Qs for the citation indicator, with a result higher than that of the other three university systems.
If Italian university research is in good health and continues to make the country competitive in the international context, explains the Crui report, “university education, on the other hand, suffers from a reduced number of teachers and advanced in age, a progressive reduction in public investments in training and, ultimately, a high social cost in terms of Neet (young people who do not study or work) and economic in terms of loss of Gross Domestic Product “.
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In terms of individual universities, the Politecnico di Milano confirms himself in the three years first in the Qs ranking reaching the 137th place in 2020 (ahead of the University of Bologna and the Wisdom). In the ranking of the Times, Bologna leads, ahead of Sant’Anna High School of Pisa and to Normal of Pisa. Nell’U-Multirank Bocconi University of Milan is in front ofImt di Lucca and, therefore, at the Politecnico di Milano.
“Promoting the growth of universities in the international context is a fundamental factor not only to increase their competitiveness, but to increase the attractiveness of the Italian education and research system as a whole”, he declares Ferruccio remains, Crui president, “it is a priority to improve the perception and positioning of the country in a unitary way, recomposing an image that is often drawn in a disjointed way”.
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