Higher education institutions (HEIs) have experienced severe cutbacks in funding over the past few years, with universities examining options for alternative funding streams, such as alumni funding. Identifying the factors influencing their alumni's intentions to invest in their alma mater can be of significant importance when establishing a…

The Gelmini reform implemented in Italy in 2010 was designed to ensure greater efficiency and effectiveness within the higher education (HE) sector. The reform was implemented in a climate of general austerity, which caused severe cuts in public funds for the university system. This paper documents the unintended consequences of the reform in…

This article aims to understand how the public higher education sector is dealing with new challenges, like sustainability in services provision and delivery, which means to fulfil all the functions of a university. In order to fulfil their mission and be sustainable, the public higher education sector should start an innovation process, through…

This study, which aims to investigate some potential effects derived from the adoption of performance-oriented funding in the higher education system, is focused on competitive allocative mechanism to provide universities with the staff recruitment budget in the Italian Higher Education System using panel data spanning the period 2012-2018 for 58…

Module A of the OECD Higher Education Policy Survey (HEPS) 2022 elicited information on policies to promote digitalisation of higher education in OECD member and accession countries. In total, 30 jurisdictions responded, providing comparative information on various areas of digitalisation policy, from regulation and governance to financial and…

The evolution of Italian universities in terms of growth, economic sustainability and reforms can be interpreted in the light of the élite, mass and universal access categories defined by Martin Trow. The findings from this analysis show that although the number of enrolled students and funding problems propel the Italian university system towards…

To obtain a better understanding of country-specific policies, a country-specific literature review was undertaken. The search entailed key-terms focusing on relevance and the three higher education relevance dimensions. The main outcomes of the country-specific literature review are discussed in this chapter. We do so by analysing the typically…

Performance-based funding (PBF) for public colleges and universities is increasingly prevalent worldwide, as a part of a broader pattern of marketisation in public education. This study focused on developing an empirical view of how, and in what contexts, policy makers use the concepts of neoliberal economics to design and support PerformanceBased…

This brochure focuses on a selection of indicators from "Education at a Glance," selected for their particular relevance in the current context. Their analysis enables the understanding of countries' response and potential impact from the COVID-19 containment measures. The following topics are discussed: (1) the impact of the crisis on…

The aim of the Regional dossiers series is to provide a concise description of European minority languages in education. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects such as the number of schools, teachers,…

In higher education systems that are partly tax funded, a country might not be willing to subsidize the education of international students who might leave after graduation. This paper analyzes how student migration affects governmental decisions regarding the private funding share of higher education for 22 OECD countries for the period of…

This paper addresses the interaction between European Union policies and national higher education sectors in the countries involved in the TRUE project (England, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Switzerland) making the case for European governance. Relevant for this matter is the role of political processes that…

This annual report shows how fee and support systems (including grants and loans) work in higher education in Europe. It provides both a comparative overview of fees and financial support available to full-time students in 2016/17, and also includes individual country sheets outlining the main elements of national systems. In particular, the…

The objective of this paper is an efficiency analysis concerning higher education systems in European countries. Data have been extracted from OECD data-sets (Education at a Glance, several years), using a non-parametric technique--data envelopment analysis--to calculate efficiency scores. This paper represents the first attempt to conduct such an…

Since 2008, Italian universities have seen their budgets slashed by 14 percent. And in late 2010 the Italian government passed a law that drastically reduced the number of contract university workers, effectively laying off thousands of postdocs, assistants, researchers, and lecturers. The law also included a planned decrease in the number of…