First year students down 3% in Italy this academic year

 

First-year university students decreased by a round 3% in this academic year, Italian daily Corriere della Sera reports. Though numbers are not yet final, the Italian academic system will nonetheless be hit by regression of matriculated students in the a.y. 2021/2022.

“Last year – unexpectedly and despite the difficulties of Covid and Dad – [Italian HEIs] had enrolled in a degree course 330,898 of the 463 thousand graduates at the high school, plus five per cent compared to 2019 (313,141 freshmen).

“As early as January 2021, the data provided by universities indicated 317,282 freshmen. Today at the same date the freshmen are only 306,763 out of 469 thousand graduates last July.

“These data, which have been compiled by the Office of Statistics of the Ministry and which will be consolidated in a few months, «photograph a substantial holding of registrations in relation to the extraordinary factor of the pandemic», according to minister Cristina Messa, although, being our country in the queue in Europe, right on the number of graduates, indicate the need for targeted interventions. It is mainly the universities of the Islands ( -7 per cent) and central Italy (- 4 per cent) that lose students: it can also be an adjustment compared to last year, when, despite the Covid, registrations had grown especially in smaller universities.

The positive news is about female students enrolling in STEM disciplines, traditionally an Achille’s heel of the Italian tertiary education system. + 3,37 % in engineering and +16,3% informatics. Though female students still represent only one-sixth of the overall population in STEM disciplines, nonetheless the trend seems to adjust in the longer period.

Opposite, foreign languages, economics, veterinary, and educational studies register negative results.

The decline of this 2021/22 marks the first negative result of a trend in university enrollment that since 2014 was slowly rising: ‘these data can be useful as a basis for assessing the effects of the investments we are making in the coming years, in particular thanks to the PNNR (EU-sponsored plan of recovery and resilience), which will give new strength to the right to study, with the increase in scholarships and university residences”, University minister Cristina Messa reports.

At the time of writing this post, it is not yet clear whether international students grew or not this A.Y., a determinant factor given the overall trend.

 

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