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Higher Education Systems and Institutions, Italy

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Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions

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Higher Education Systems Development

Italy’s population stands at 60 million. Unified only in 1861, the last 150 or so years have been fraught with strong economic and social differences, which still have repercussions in the present. The southern regions, for example, are having particular difficulties in keeping up with the rest of the country (Moscati 2006; Fondazione Res 2016).

Since unification, education has been perceived as one of the most important tools for binding together socially and culturally the different regions and populations, which is why the system has remained mostly public and centralized.

At a formal level, increasing demand for higher education produced a number of changes in quantitative terms. New universities were opened, so that the number of higher education institutions (HEIs) rose from 41 in 1960/61 to 54 in 1986/87 and arrived at 96 (66 state universities and 30 private ones) in 2015/16. The number of private universities has been growing in recent...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy

    Roberto Moscati

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  1. Roberto Moscati
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Correspondence to Roberto Moscati .

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  1. School of Education, Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom

    Barbara M. Kehm

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Moscati, R. (2018). Higher Education Systems and Institutions, Italy. In: Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_514-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_514-1

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