Major universities play catch-up as Italian students move online

The surge in popularity of online learning is starting to reshape the Italian sector, as experts suggest that traditional universities are beginning to appreciate at least some of their advantages.

Italy’s university evaluation agency (Anvur) has reported that enrolments at online-only private universities rose from just over 40,000 in 2012 to more than 220,000 in 2022, an increase of 410 per cent, while rolls at in-person private institutions grew by just over 20 per cent and those at public universities shrank by about 1 per cent.

Andrea Gavosto, director of the Giovanni Agnelli Foundation, an education thinktank, told Times Higher Education that the dramatic shift to private online tuition was driven in large part by living costs.

Although tuition fees at public universities typically come in at only a few hundred euros, about one-tenth that charged by their online counterparts, the cost of food, travel and accommodation in major cities is a barrier for many students.

Online provision has typically been popular with older students, particularly dropouts from traditional programmes, but the average age of participants is dropping, the Anvur figures show. “There is not a perfect overlap between traditional and online universities, but this overlap is increasing,” Dr Gavosto said.

Aside from Italian cities’ prohibitive living costs, growth in online study has been made possible by a greater acceptance since the pandemic. Nevertheless, digital-only institutions still face “social stigma”, said Flaviana Palmisano, an associate professor of finance at Sapienza University of Rome who has written about online universities’ remarkable rise.

In a prickly piece for the economic analysis website Lavoce, Paolo Miccoli, the president of Italy’s Association of Telematic and Digital Universities, said critics who decried online operations’ student-to-staff ratios, often 10 times those found in the public sector, were applying an unfair yardstick to more efficient digital teaching.

Prejudice and poor metrics may indeed be problems, but online universities do face looser quality control, and those who have peered under their bonnets have found questionable workings – Dr Gavosto recalled a CV that described one online lecturer as a specialist in both international law and medieval history.

Despite its issues, online study has proved a particularly popular first step into closely regulated psychology careers, he said, with more than half those taking the postgraduate state exam having received their bachelor’s online. A good chunk of online students are seeking promotion in the public sector, where hiring managers care only that individuals have a degree, not the prestige of the institution granting it, Dr Gavosto added.

Public sector academics receive fixed civil servant salaries, and their departments get no extra income from the work of setting up online offerings; however, their universities want a slice of the growing pie. Prestigious Sapienza has an online-only subsidiary, UnitelmaSapienza.

Dr Palmisano said such separation protects a parent institution from association with an online university, while the latter can trade on an established brand. She predicted that Sapienza would trial offering some of its own courses entirely online in the years ahead, as the Polytechnic University of Milan has for computer engineering.

The government has signalled that stricter regulations are coming for online institutions, which could encourage further convergence as well as segmentation around quality. “In 10 years’ time, I would bet my money on the fact that some online universities will try to raise the quality of the teaching,” said Dr Gavosto. “For the time being, I wouldn’t recommend my son to go to an online university.”

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com