Italy: Billion euro boost for southern universities

By Lee Adendorff. The Italian government is to pump more than EUR1 billion (US$1.3 billion) into universities in the south of the country as part of a regeneration plan for the region. The decision was announced last week by Raffaele Fitto, minister for regional relationships and territorial cohesion, and Mariastella Gelmini, the education minister. Gelmini said: "It's a plan of extraordinary merit. It will serve to reinforce university building programmes and to increase excellence."
The funding is part of a comprehensive government development programme for Italy's struggling southern region, which still lags behind the north. A total of EUR1.014 billion is to be made available to institutions. The lion's share is destined for Puglia (EUR315 million) and Sardinia (EUR301 million) while EUR63.8 million will be dedicated to Calabria, EUR68.6 million to Campania, EUR88.7 million to Sicily and EUR22 million to Basilicata.
The central region of Abruzzo, struck by a devastating earthquake in 2009, is also to receive EUR5 million. The funding boost is aimed mostly at improving the physical development of universities, with the restoration or construction of infrastructure such as laboratories, libraries, student residences, cafeterias and information technology resources the main priorities.
EUR150 million is also being devoted to the development of research centres of excellence, advanced learning and innovation in Campania, Puglia, Calabria and Sicily. The political and economic divide between north and south is an ongoing and complex problem in Italy. Poverty levels are five times higher in southern Italy when compared to northern Italy, according to the consumer association Lega Consumatori, while unemployment in the south is more than double that of the north, a 2011 study by the Association for Southern Industrial Development, Svimez, reported.
Some 30% of southern university graduates aged between 15 and 34 neither work nor study and many have "abandoned the education system, believing further study is useless to getting a job", according to the Svimez study. A gradually increasing number of southern students are also choosing to study in northern institutions. A 2009 study by the social and political studies institute Censis showed that of the 354,000 students studying outside of their home regions, around a third came from the southern regions of Puglia, Calabria and Campania.
While just two of Italy's top nine universities came from the south, in a recent ranking published by Censis and the newspaper La Repubblica, there are exceptions. Professor Marino Regini, vice-rector of the Università degli studi di Milano and author of several studies on Italian universities, said: "It is difficult to make a neat distinction between north and south. In international rankings, Italy just about never appears in the top 100 universities but there are many Italian universities in the top 500 and these are almost all in the central and northern regions.
"This doesn't mean, however, that there are not excellent universities in the south - Federico II in Naples, for example, ranks among the best," he said.
Regini said that the extra funding would be a certain boost but that institutions needed to spend the money selectively.
"Even the best northern universities cannot compete internationally in every area and this is even more true in the south, where institutions need to choose the diversified areas that they can excel in and not use a scattergun approach to spending."