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The north–south divide in the Italian higher education system

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Abstract

This work examines whether the macroeconomic divide between northern and southern Italy is also present at the level of higher education. The analysis confirms that the research performance in the sciences of the professors in the south is on average less than that of the professors in the north, and that this gap does not show noticeable variations at the level of gender or academic rank. For the universities, the gap is still greater. The study analyzes some possible determinants of the gap, and provides some policy recommendations for its reduction.

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Notes

  1. This law was intended to grant increased autonomy and responsibility to the universities to establish their own organizational frameworks, including charters and regulations. Subsequently, Law 537 (Article 5) of 1993 and Decree 168 of 1996 provided further changes intended to increase university involvement in overall decision-making on use of resources, and to encourage individual institutions to operate in the market and reach their own economic and financial equilibrium.

  2. The complete list is accessible at http://attiministeriali.miur.it/UserFiles/115.htm. Last accessed on September 19, 2016.

  3. A more extensive theoretical dissertation on how to operationalize the measurement of productivity can be found in Abramo and D’Angelo (2014).

  4. Abramo et al. (2012b) demonstrated that this is the best-performing scaling factor.

  5. Because of its discrete character, the percentile scale may mislead the interpretation of productivity differences between north and south. 25 % lower average productivity in the south results in only 6.4 percentile difference.

  6. From this point, for “average productivity” we will use the average percentile rank by FSS rather than the average FSS, which would be affected by the presence of outliers.

  7. The SDSs excluded are: CHIM/05, FIS/08, GEO/12, ING-IND/18, ING-IND/20, ING-IND/30, MED/47, ING-IND/01, ING-IND/02, ING-IND/23.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Studies of Research Evaluation, Institute for System Analysis and Computer Science (IASI-CNR), National Research Council of Italy, Via dei Taurini 19, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo

  2. Department of Engineering and Management, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133, Rome, Italy

    Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo

  3. Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Centrifugevej, Building 372, 2800, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark

    Francesco Rosati

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  1. Giovanni Abramo
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Correspondence to Giovanni Abramo.

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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. & Rosati, F. The north–south divide in the Italian higher education system. Scientometrics 109, 2093–2117 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2141-9

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