30 October 2025
Authors: Antonio Daood, Niels Noorderhaven
Abstract:
The landscape of tertiary education has been dramatically changing. As any other sector, the world of higher education institutions has been shaped by the transformations in the socio-economic context. In Europe, and worldwide, the size of the higher-education sector has been growing tremendously, both in terms of the number of universities and pool of students. Today, higher education institutions operate in a complex environment: first, they are heavily regulated by government, and are subject to the external evaluation of a broad set of third parties such as national evaluation bodies, international accreditation bodies and international rankings. Second, as universities are an important driver for domestic and international growth, countries are more and more actively competing for the increasing number of mobile students looking to study abroad. According to OECD data, with 6.1 million students worldwide that enrolled in a study program abroad in 2019, the magnitude of international mobility has more than doubled since 2007. Globalization and digitization made students around the world more aware of the quality of higher education institutions, and, not surprisingly, the top destinations of foreign students are top-ranked universities. These phenomena, together with the resulting “massification” of the educational offer, are making the market for students increasingly competitive, which demands a more entrepreneurial response from university. Such a hypercompetitive scenario places a lot of pressures on universities, with the ability to attract international students being one of the key indicators to evaluate the performance of higher education institutions. Italy is not an exception.In 2021, Italy has 98 active higher education institutions, 31 of which are private institutions: 20 universities and 11 online universities. In ten years, from the academic year 2010/2011 to 2020-2021, the number of new yearly enrolments (i.e., students with Italian citizenship enrolling for the first time at an Italian university – masters excluded) in all the Italian universities has grown by 14,55% (from 288.876 to 330.898), and the number of new yearly enrolments of foreign students in the same institutions increased by 37,88% in the same period (from 12.846 to 17.712). In this scenario, the different universities in Italy had heterogeneous performances, with some growing faster than the others. One of the universities standing out the most in the Italian landscape is Luiss University, which registered an increase in the number of new enrolments by 39,29% against the overall national increase of 14,55%, and a growth of 243,48% in the number of the new yearly enrolments of foreign students against an overall national growth of 37.88%.
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