Abstract:

Following the Bologna declaration, in 1999 Italy began the process of university reform which completely changed the higher education system. The main results of this process are the three-cycle university system and the introduction of the system of credits. The aim of this paper is to present a careful analysis of the changes occurred after this reform and establish whether the objectives of this reform, which was introduced more than ten years ago, have been achieved.
This study is focused on the analysis of the trend of some typical indicators of the university system in order to assess how the introduction of the reform has changed the Italian university system, starting from its peculiarities. Before the reform, the Italian higher education system was mainly characterized by: low graduation rates, high university dropout rates, low level of mobility of the students within Italy, low level of international mobility of the students (moving from and to Italy) and difficult in transition from education to work due to a mismatch between education system and job requirement. Starting from the available data supplied by the Ministry of Education (MIUR) we will analyze each of these aspects. Concerning the time the students take to obtain their degrees we propose a historical analysis of the graduation rates (within institutional time or at the most one year later) distinguishing the different types of faculties. Regarding the dropout rates we will analyze both the trend of university dropout rates and a report of the proportion between “active students” and “inactive students” (students enrolled in university who do not take examinations). A similar analysis, supported by some graphical illustrations, will be carried out concerning the national and international mobility of the students.
Since the reform there have also been many structural changes in the characteristics of the university students and in the organization of the courses, which were not foreseen by the reform but may have been caused by it. Therefore attention will be also paid to the analysis of the high increase of the number of courses, the increase of the average age of enrolment at university and the phenomenon of “early graduate students”.

Keywords:

university reform, trends in higher education, students’ mobility, evaluation indicators, inactive students.