Using performance measurement to make italian universities more financially sustainable

The changes that are affecting state universities are rather clear. The institutional and managerial profiles which characterized these secular institutions have been deeply questioned. The “old” model that considered higher education as a public good and conceived university as a social institution easily accessible to all, is declining. It has been replaced by a new one which considers universities rather as companies able to pursue efficiency, effectiveness and financial sustainability. This new “managerial” model has never been popular in Italy, where the traditional “social” one continued to prevail. The main idea we want to expose in this chapter is that Italian state university system, which is also characterized, for the most part, as being closed to competition and to international comparison, only recently has begun to change, taking the first steps in this new direction. Only with the Gelmini reform of 2010, performance management logics and tools, typical of the managerial model, has begun to scratch a closed and self-referential system like the Italian one. Considering the above mentioned aspects, the aim of this chapter is to show how Italian state university system was forced to change, to rethink itself. The chapter is structured as follows. After the introduction, section 9.2 describes the process of reform of Italian state university system. Sections 9.3, 9.4, and 9.5 discuss in depth the three main waves of reform that occurred over the last thirty years. The conclusion provides some reflections upon the characteristics of the reform process and its implications for Italian universities.