10.6092/issn.3034-8544/18967
The text discusses the inadequacy of tertiary education levels in Italy to meet the demands of the contemporary economy and society. The analysis reveals concerning statistics, indicating a significant lag in educational attainment among young Italians, particularly in southern regions. It highlights the economic implications of this educational gap, affecting productivity, entrepreneurship, and overall economic growth. Factors contributing to the low levels of university graduates include meager entry rates into the university system and lower rates of study completion.
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Gianfranco Viesti
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Urbana
Geographical Disparities
Tertiary Education Levels in our Country are Insufficient for the Needs of the Contemporary Economy and Society
Text.Serial.Journal
https://urbana.unibo.it/
1
Keynote
2024-01-25
2024-01-22
2024-01-25
2024-03-20
20-26
Urb
Gianfranco Viesti
2024/01/25
10.6092/issn.3034-8544/18967
20
University of Bari Aldo Moro
3034-8544
1
Geographical Disparities
en
26
Tertiary Education Levels in our Country are Insufficient for the Needs of the Contemporary Economy and Society
https://urbana.unibo.it/article/download/18967/17485
1
                                                       URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024              20




Tertiary Education Levels in our Country
are Insufficient for the Needs of the
Contemporary Economy and Society
KEYNOTE SPEAKER


Gianfranco Viesti

University of Bari Aldo Moro

gianfranco.viesti@uniba.it


The difficulties of the Italian economy have articulated causes, but they
are primarily attributable to the very modest productivity dynamics.
Between 1995 and 2019, labor productivity in Italy grew by 0.3% per year,
compared with the value of 1.6% in the EU-28, and much lower than in
France (1.3%), the UK (1.5%), Germany (1.3%), and Spain (0.6%).1
Insufficient productivity growth is linked to our production system's
mediocre ability to adapt to the major changes of the twenty-first century:
growing trade and locational competition from emerging and Eastern
European countries for productions with greater price competition and
the emergence of new innovative goods and services based on new
digitally driven technologies. Underlying this lack of adaptability are
several factors, but certainly, the most relevant ones are the low levels of
education of our entrepreneurs and workforce.
In this respect, Italy's historical lag is not being bridged. Eurostat data
show that out of every 100 young people aged 30 to 34 in Italy, as many as
27 do not have a high school diploma, and only 28 have a university
degree (2019). These figures are far worse than in other EU partners.
Within the country, data are significantly worse for southern Italy
regions. There is so vast evidence of the importance of these data for the
economy, both regarding productivity and entrepreneurship. Suffice it to
mention, thanks to data from Istat's “Knowledge Report”,2 that the
educational level of entrepreneurs in Italian small businesses is 11.4
years of schooling (less than a high school diploma); the most common
educational qualification is the lower middle school diploma (38% of the
total). The average education level of workers is 10.8 years of schooling.
However, better-educated entrepreneurs hire better-educated staff: each
additional year of schooling for entrepreneurs is associated with 1.3 more
years in employees' education. Moreover, better-educated entrepreneurs
tend to pay their staff better. This produces important effects: each

1
   Istat, Misure di produttività anni 1995-2019, Statistiche Report (November 4, 2020).
https://www.istat.it/it/files/2020/11/Report_MISURE_PRODUTTIVITA_1995_2019.pdf.
2
  Istat, Rapporto sulla conoscenza, Economia e società (Rome, 2020).


                                                                   Copyright 2024 The Author(s)
                                               This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.3034-8544/18967               Attribution 4.0 International License
                                                          URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024          21




additional year of education in employees' average results in a
productivity increase of just under 4%. Each additional year corresponds
to a 30% increase in the probability of ERP (management) application
adoption, a 20% increase in CRM (customer relationship) adoption, and
a 6% difference in the percentage of employees using computers. Again,
a 2019 AlmaLaurea Report3 documents that among 2004-2018 graduates,
7% founded a business (the percentage rises to 18% for master’s
graduates). 6.7% in the North, 7.3% in the center, and 7.5% in the South.
As a result, 236,000 enterprises (3.9% of all enterprises) were born,
including 2,127 innovative start-ups (20.2% of all innovative start-ups).
Why does Italy have so few university graduates? Based on an estimate in
the Anvur report, it can be argued that this is mainly due to meager entry
rates into the university system: this factor explains two-thirds of the
difference; one-third of the difference is due to lower rates of study
completion: the problem remains, but study regularity has significantly
increased in recent years. Nearly 60 percent of Italian boys and girls have
never entered a university. Trends in enrollment data are unfavorable:
they had been growing until 2005, partly due to the positive effect of more
mature students “returning” to university. However, they then steadily
declined for ten years; they returned slightly to grow from 2015 onward,
but the number of students enrolled in 2018-19 is at the level of 2000. Italy
is especially lacking in the enrollment of students from the weaker strata
of society, from lower-status families, with a lower level of education, and
from secondary technical and professional institutes. The drop in
enrollment, partly because of what was just mentioned, was most
noticeable for students from the weaker regions of the country. The
correlation between parents' and children's educational qualifications
remains strong, a dangerous sign of low social mobility.
The trend in enrollment has been negatively affected by the sharp
increase in university taxation and the poor level of interventions for the
right to study. University taxation in Italy has become the highest in
Continental Europe (after Holland and Latvia). The approximately $2,000
(at purchasing power parity) annual cost of university studies in Italy 4
should also be compared with the free university studies in the
Scandinavians and several Eastern countries, with Germany's $133 and
France's $237. The average contribution has risen from just over 1,000
Euros in 2013-14 to over 1,300 in 2017-18, a very noticeable increase.5
Fortunately, total exemption from the fee for students from less affluent
families (based on ISEE) was subsequently introduced; so, in 2017-18,
25% of enrolled students were exempt from the fee (a percentage that
grew later): this circumstance contributed to the upswing in

3
  AlmaLaurea, Laurea e imprenditorialità (executive summary, December 2019).
4
  Oecd, Education at a Glance, OECD Indicators (Paris: OECD Publishing, September 10, 2019),
https://doi.org/10.1787/f8d7880d-en.
5
  MIUR, “La contribuzione studentesca negli Atenei e negli istituti AFAM, anno accademico 2017-
18” (Rome, July 2019).
                                                             URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024           22




matriculations. As for scholarships and student services, they have
always been (as analytically documented in the 2016 report “Università in
declino”) far below other European countries. However, in this case too,
there have been changes in recent years, with a significant increase in
scholarships starting in 2015. It is a very positive figure, though it only
narrows a little and certainly does not close the gaps with other countries.
Overall, there is resounding public underfunding of the Italian university
system. As of 2018, public university funding amounted to 7.3 billion
Euros in Italy: these should be compared to 31 for Germany, 25 for
France, nearly 8 for Spain, and about 6 for Sweden.6 Expressed on a per
capita basis, they result in a per capita funding of 121 Euros in Italy, while
figures are much higher elsewhere; even Poland has now come close to
Italy's figure. In the decade 2008-18, public funding in Italy decreased by
14%, while it increased greatly in the other contexts, in emerging
countries such as Poland and Turkey, by 27% and 61%, respectively. In
Spain, it has also decreased a lot (-23%). However, it started from much
higher levels.
The sharp contraction of public investment in Italian universities has
resulted in a freeze on professors' turnover, with different scales over the
years. This led to a threefold consequence. First, the total number of
professors, according to a survey by the National University Council,7 has
decreased from 44,799 at the end of 2006 to 37,837 at the end of 2017. The
ratio of faculty to enrolled students in Italy is worse than in other
European countries. With the reduction in staffing levels, it has worsened
further: according to Anvur surveys, it went from 27 students per faculty
member in 2008 to 31.5 in 2017. Second, the freeze has resulted in
significantly aging the current staff. Finally, this congestion left an entire
generation of young scholars out of the academic path, forcing them
either into underpaid, precarious positions (possible, however, only for
those with sufficient family resources) or into emigration. This
phenomenon has increased significantly in the last decade.8 As an
essential and negative side effect, recruitment decisions, and regulations
have sharply declined professors' mobility between universities.9
Fortunately, there have been some signs of a counter-trend in the most
recent period, mainly related to new calls for fixed-term type B
researchers. By the end of 2018, an increase in teaching staff to 39,200
was visible.10 More recent data report further improvement.


6
  EUA, Public Funding Observatory Report 2019/2020 (February 20, 2020).
7
  CUN National University Council, The University System in the Analysis of the National University
Council 2017-2019 (Rome, January 2019).
8
   Leopoldo Nascia, Mario Pianta and A. Stilo, “The migration of researchers in Europe. A pilot
study of Italy”, Final Report for the EU Joint Research Centre (March 2020).
9
  Domenico Cersosimo, Rosanna Nisticò, Emmanuele Pavolini, Francesco Prota and Gianfranco
Viesti, “Circolazione del capitale umano e politiche universitarie: un’analisi del caso italiano,”
Politiche Sociali, n. 3 (2018): 387-406.
10
   CUN, The University System in the Analysis of the National University Council 2017-2019.
                                                                URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024            23




The contraction of financial and human resources for the Italian
university system has been highly geographically selective due to
questionable provisions, analytically documented in the volume
“Università in Declino.” Universities in the more “peripheral” North, and
especially in the South-Central area, have been particularly
disadvantaged. Updating those data11 shows how, between 2008 and 2018,
the Ordinary Financing Fund (FFO, Fondo di Finanziamento Ordinario)
for universities decreased by 4% in nominal terms. The reduction
reached 13% in Genoa, 7% in Florence, 17% for Rome La Sapienza, and
15% for Bari, to a maximum, among the top fifteen Italian universities of
almost 24% in Messina. The turnover in the teaching staff between 2012
and 2019, expressed as the percentage of “staff positions” made available
by retirements and those actually available, was 58% for the entire Italian
university system. But it was 47% in Genoa, 50% in Florence, 47% for
Rome La Sapienza, 42% for Bari, down to a low of 35% for Catania, among
the top 15 Italian universities.
On the one hand, the differences in turnover are directly related to the
decline in FFO, which is, as shown above, much more intense in some
locations. On the other hand, they are tied to the laws linking it to
revenues from student taxation. As mentioned earlier, it has increased
sharply, to a greater extent, in universities in the South Central. But,
given the widely varying income levels of households, the rate increase
did not produce the same revenue for universities in less wealthy areas
of the country. Note that, according to an Istat survey referring to 2014-
1512 in that year, the average household income of a student at the
University of Catania (16,400 Euros) was slightly more than half that of a
student at the Politecnico or Statale di Milano. This difference is
consistent with the average household disposable income variability
across Italian regions. Some analyses by the Bank of Italy show that, as a
result of the lack of turnover, the supply of usable university courses
within an hour's travel time from the municipality of residence has
shrunk in the South (where it was already lower) to a much greater extent
than in the rest of the country.13
The decline in enrollment has been accompanied by a significant
increase in student flows from the South to universities in the North, both
for bachelor's degrees and, even more for master's degrees. These flows
are mainly explained by the different opportunities in the labor market,
with disparities becoming more pronounced in the last decade. This is
also shown by the reduced flow of southern students to the universities
of Lazio and Tuscany. Despite their undisputed prestige, they offer fewer

11
    Gianfranco Viesti, “Le politiche universitarie”, SINAPPSI Connessioni tra ricerca e politiche
pubbliche, IX, no.3 (2019): 94-105.
12
   Istat, Studenti e bacini universitari (Rome, 2016). https://www.istat.it/it/files/2016/11/Studenti-e-
bacini-universitari.pdf
13
    Sources and data can be found in: Gianfranco Viesti, La laurea negata. Le politiche contro
l’istruzione universitaria (Rome-Bari: Editori Laterza, 2018).
                                                           URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024           24




opportunities for placement in the labor market. Analyses on the areas
of origin of Southern university students who enroll in the North-Central
region show that the percentages of students who move correlate with
the availability of a wide range of educational offerings that can also be
reached through commuter attendance. The percentage of students who
enrolled in the North-Central region in 2014-15 ranged from values even
higher than 50 percent for the provinces of Trapani and Ragusa to
completely physiological values of just over 10% for the provinces of
Naples, Cagliari, Catania, Palermo, and Bari.
Thus, the enrollment trends mentioned above, also related to tuition fee
increases, together with their geographic dynamics, have produced a
highly diversified picture. Between 2010-11 and 2017-18, enrollments
declined by 7% in the national average; however, they dropped (again,
among the fifteen major Italian universities) by 14% in Genoa, 8% in
Florence, 19% in Rome La Sapienza, 25% in Bari, to a high of 29% in
Messina.
The above can be summed up by concluding that a selective and
cumulative compression of the Italian university system has been
underway since 2008. It is a compression as the size of the system, while
largely smaller than in European countries comparable to Italy, has
shrunk significantly. It is selective because, due to a patchwork of mainly
regulatory provisions, this reduction has been considerably more
significant for universities in the South-Central part of the country and
particularly for those in the Islands. In recent years, there has been
strong political-cultural pressure for investment in the Italian university
system to be concentrated only in some “elected” locations. All of them
are in the strongest areas of the country. Instead, the rest of the system
was abandoned to an ancillary role (e.g., limited to bachelor's degree
courses only or without research activities). It is cumulative because
these were not one-off cuts; instead, they were due to mechanisms
(particularly the new criteria for allocating FFO in both its primary and
so-called “premium” components and the criteria for allocating “staff
points”). Thus, sharply shrinking universities can hardly counteract their
“decline,” as reductions in public funding, faculty, courses, and students
feed off each other. The idea that universities should downsize the
number of current students seems unsupportable. The number of
students reached, particularly in some locations, can only be considered
pathological and not physiological; indeed, this is undesirable.
Moreover, it is incompatible with a revival of the Italian economy itself.
A recent study14 documents how the ratio of college teachers to
“potential” enrollees, namely high school graduates, is much lower and
worsened to a greater extent in the South.

14
  Lucia Rizzica, “The Italian Public Sector Workforce. Recent Evolution in the Light of the Rules
on Turnover,” Questioni di Economia e Finanza (occasional paper), no.560 (Banca d'Italia, June
2020).
                                                             URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024            25




Fortunately, it should be acknowledged that some positive provisions
have been introduced in recent years, some of which have been recalled.
Enrollment figures in 2020-21, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, are
encouraging and also related to the extension of the university tax
exemption. However, they do not yet seem able to reverse the course that
has been summarily described here, but only to slow it down, nor even to
heal the effects of a long decade of “anti-university policies.”15
A truly great plan for the revitalization of the Italian university can only
consist, also and above all, of interventions in a profoundly different
direction from the last twelve years. They must aim at its structural
strengthening through rules and current funding, enabling it to function
in conditions of normal ordinary operation. It should involve initiatives
to increase high school-to-college transition rates significantly, steadily,
and strongly increasing enrollment and overall enrollment size.
Eliminating taxation for some students is only a first step, albeit in the
right direction; it should be accompanied by intense policies to promote
the right to study and educational mechanisms to remedy the lack of
knowledge of matriculates and reduce first-year dropouts. The sensitive
recruitment of new researchers is undoubtedly going in the right
direction; however, it needs to be made permanent, giving reasonable
recruitment opportunities to younger people. Moreover, it certainly must
be rebalanced from a territorial point of view.


References

AlmaLaurea, Laurea               e    imprenditorialità        (executive        summary,
December 2019).

Cersosimo, Domenico, Rosanna Nistricò, Emmanuele Pavolini,
Francesco Prota and Gianfranco Viesti. “Circolazione del capitale
umano e politiche universitarie: un'analisi del caso italiano,” Politiche
Sociali, n.3 (2018): 387-406.

CUN National University Council, The University System in the Analysis
of the National University Council 2017-2019 (Rome, January 2019).

EUA, Public Funding Observatory Report 2019/2020 (February 20, 2020).

Istat, Misure di produttività anni 1995-2019, Statistiche Report
(November 4, 2020).

Istat, Rapporto sulla conoscenza, Economia e società (Rome, 2020).

15
  For an analytical description, far more than could be done here, see: Viesti, La laurea negata. Le
politiche contro l’istruzione universitaria.
                                              URBANA Vol. 1, N. 1, 2024    26




Istat,   Studenti      e     bacini    universitari   (Rome,      2016),
https://www.istat.it/it/files/2016/11/Studenti-e-bacini-universitari.pdf

MIUR, La contribuzione studentesca negli Atanei e negli istituti AFAM,
anno accademico 2017-2018 (Rome, July 2019).

Nascia, Leopoldo and Mario Pianta, “L'emigrazione dei ricercatori
italiani [The emigration of Italian researchers],” MPRA Paper 106670
(2020).

Oecd, Education at a Glance, Oecd Indicators (Paris: Oecd Publishing,
September 10, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1787/f8d7880d-en

Viesti, Gianfranco, “Le politiche universitarie”, SINAPPSI
Connessioni tra ricerca e politiche pubbliche, IX, no.3 (2019): 94-105.

Viesti Gianfranco, La laurea negata. Le politiche contro l’istruzione
universitaria (Rome-Bari: Editori Laterza, 2018).

Rizzica Lucia, “The Italian Public Sector Workforce. Recent Evolution
in the Light of the Rules on Turnover,” Questioni di Economia e Finanza
(occasional paper), no.560 (Banca d'Italia, June 2020).
