Stefano Paleari

Italy remains well below the European average in tertiary attainment, a gap that has reinforced a policy narrative centered on the need to increase the number of graduates. Yet aggregate attainment indicators provide limited information on the nature of graduate expansion, particularly in terms of degree level, field of study, institutional type, and labor-market alignment. This paper examines the expansion of distance-learning universities in Italy as a specific case through which to assess the nature and implications of graduate growth. Using administrative data from the Italian Ministry of University and Research and AlmaLaurea survey data, the study compares graduates from state, non-state campus-based, and distance-learning universities across degree levels and fields of study. Results show that distance-learning universities have become a major contributor to graduate growth, accounting for 18% of graduates in 2024. However, their expansion is concentrated in fields such as sport science, law, education, psychology, and social sciences, while their presence remains limited in STEM and health-related areas. These findings suggest that distance-learning higher education may formally help Italy move closer to European tertiary attainment targets, while also highlighting the need to consider whether it addresses the disciplinary imbalances that shape graduate supply and labor-market alignment.

Healthcare drug development resolves scientific uncertainty through a standardized, legally mandated, and publicly registered sequence of clinical-trial milestones. We ask how this validation process organizes the actors who finance innovation: who invests first, how the mix changes as ventures advance, and where ventures exit. Measuring investors from the identities of round participants rather than from deal-stage labels, we follow an ex ante cohort of drug-development ventures from first financing and link clinical-stage ventures to their registered Phase II and Phase III trials. Ventures that begin with angel investors are substantially more likely to obtain venture capital afterwards than comparable ventures without them, the opposite of the angel-venture-capital substitution documented in broad multi-sector data. Within the same venture, the mix of investors recomposes along the clinical ladder: angel participation concentrates in the rounds before the first late-stage trial registration while institutional capital participates throughout, and across the cohort public grants cluster in the same early window as angels. The timing of financing, at least, shows no detectable response to individual trial outcomes, whose first datable registry signal arrives only after long delays. The configuration extends to the end of the ladder, where ventures that begin with angel backing disproportionately exit through public listings. Rather than a simple handoff from angels to venture capital, the evidence reveals an ordered configuration of financing actors whose relative participation changes along the sector's validation process, with implications for how early-stage funding programs are evaluated.

International higher education is being reorganized by competition between business models rather than by competition between national systems alone. This Brief argues that the long-standing U.S. advantage in attracting international students and scientific talent is increasingly challenged as its premium price becomes harder to justify relative to perceived educational and career returns and growing external policy risks. The problem is not that U.S. universities have ceased to be excellent, especially at the elite end of the system. Rather, their global position has become increasingly exposed to tuition inflation, dependence on high-fee international enrollments, and political uncertainty around visas, campus conflict, and the treatment of foreign students. Europe has become a credible alternative because it offers a different value proposition: lower fees, broadly distributed quality, standardized degree structures, English-taught programs, and an explicit internationalization strategy, particularly in business schools. Yet Europe is not a new hegemon; it lacks the same concentration of global flagship universities and faces its own political and demographic constraints. The transatlantic comparison therefore points to a more plural and segmented market for global talent. For technology transfer and innovation systems, the central implication is that the geography of knowledge production will depend increasingly on how higher education systems balance cost, quality, openness, and political predictability.

This study investigates the impact of the needs-based tuition waiver policy introduced in Italy in 2017/2018 to support students from low-income households. By 2023, after progressive relaxations of the eligibility threshold, about 40% of students enrolled in public universities benefited from tuition waivers. We rely on the open database of the Ministry of University and Research, and the analysis focuses on the effects on enrollment trends, drop-out rates, student mobility, and the distribution of study areas, adopting a macro-level perspective. The results show that increasing the number of students benefiting from tuition waivers could have a negative impact on the sustainability and quality of the system. It could also encourage students to move, which could cause problems for both universities and the economy in less attractive regions. According to these findings, policymakers should find the optimal balance in subsidizing low-income students while avoiding negative outcomes.

This paper describes a patented multi-injection syringe system which presents a retractable hypodermic needle with assisted actuation to minimize the risk of needlestick injuries and disease transmission. The objective is achieved through a user-friendly mechanism that ensures safe needle retraction after each injection. The mechanism consists of at least one spring and one flexural spring that provide assisted needle movement and secure locking in multiple positions. The invented system can be applied in various medical fields and offers a safer alternative to conventional syringes, as it effectively addresses critical biological hazards in clinical operations.

Ensuring widespread accessibility of healthcare services is a crucial policy objective. Accordingly, the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) has prioritized territorial medicine, channeling post-pandemic investments toward the restructuring of primary care services. A notable change is the establishment of Community Healthcare Centers (CHCs). This paper investigates how CHCs contribute to the accessibility of healthcare in urban and rural areas. By leveraging a comprehensive dataset of general practitioners’ availability and estimating future demand-and-supply scenarios, we examine the impact of CHCs under two different capacity allocation strategies. Strategy 1—Capacity expansion—involves allocating additional service hours of general practitioners to CHCs in order to maximize accessibility. Strategy 2—Capacity redistribution—accounts for the persistent shortage of healthcare professionals faced by Italy in the recent years by reallocating a portion of general practitioners’ current services from their existing workplace locations to CHCs. Our results indicate that CHCs have the potential to maintain current accessibility levels and also enhance them in the years to come. Moreover, we demonstrate that simply redistributing the current capacity can improve future accessibility. Finally, we show that a mix of the capacity expansion and redistribution strategies (Strategy 3) can maximize accessibility in the future, limiting the need for new professional staff.

In recent years, societies all over the world have been confronted with new challenges, such as the increasing pace of climate change, stimulating a growing debate about the role of higher education institutions (HEIs) to help tackle these grand challenges. Consequently, this impacts how technology transfer is pursued and what societies want it to produce, making the third mission in the higher education context also a green mission. Thus, excellence in sustainability complements excellence in research and teaching, resulting in a demand for new metrics to rank and position HEIs globally in terms of their sustainability efforts. A widely accepted and prominent ranking has been established by the University of Indonesia, the UI GreenMetric ranking. Since its founding a decade ago, substantial literature has been published about this ranking to examine and evaluate it from multiple perspectives and with various methodologies. This paper summarizes the body of literature on the UI GreenMetric and provides a critical analysis, indicating a tendency towards a self-selection reporting bias of the participating universities and countries, which demonstrates a potential use of the ranking as a means of greenwashing.