Mattia Cattaneo

University spatial competition for students: the Italian case

ABSTRACT University spatial competition for students: the Italian case. Regional Studies. The ability to attract students has become crucial for the sustainability of universities, especially in Southern Europe, where the decrease of governmental funding has been dramatic following the financial crisis. By using a competing destinations model on the student flows to 75 Italian universities in the period 2003–12, and modelling university competition with respect to different market segmentations, the paper provides evidence that Italian universities operated under competition forces in the last decade. Results hold when controlling for universities’ educational offer, trying different definitions of university attractiveness, excluding private academic institutions and limiting the analysis to non-selective courses.

PhD funding as a determinant of PhD and career research performance

This article focuses on the effects of PhD funding on research performance both during the degree and throughout researchers’ careers as measured through publications and citations. This analysis draws from a representative sample of researchers holding a doctorate based in Portugal and finds that those funded by grants during the PhD perform better than the self-funded ones. It also finds that different PhD funding sources produce different outcomes. PhD grants positively affect research performance during the PhD and throughout the career, when compared with research project grants. We argue that the latter funding scheme has more limited effects because of the constraints typical of early stage researchers involved in research project dynamics.

Why do universities internationalize? Organizational reputation and legitimacy

This article investigates the internationalization process in higher education at the institutional level. Drawing on an original perspective informed by organizational theory, we propose two theoretical dimensions of universities’ internationalization: international reputation and local legitimacy. Building upon the categorization proposed by Knight (Journal of Studies in International Education 8(1):5–31, 2004), we argue that international reputation and local legitimacy permeate rationales for international institutional development with respect to the different status of a university. Specifically, non-ranked universities do not exploit internationalization benefits to acquire an international reputation, as ranked universities do; rather, they do so primarily to gain legitimacy in the local context. These institutions suffer from higher information asymmetries in disclosing the value of their educational services, and try to provide a signal to students and their families and help them perceive their quality. We make use of explorative case studies referring to two Italian universities highlighting the different reasons universities have to pursue an internationalization strategy. We conclude that universities of different ranking pursue internationalization for dissimilar purposes, either to distinguish at a global level and to secure a place on the national map.

The relationship between competition and programmatic diversification

ABSTRACT In this study, we analyse the relationship between competition and programmatic diversification in 75 Italian universities from the academic years of 2003/2004 to 2011/2012. Results show that local competition, rather than national competition, influences programmatic diversification. The relationship between local competition and programmatic diversification is found to be quadratic such that when competition increases, diversification decreases and specialisation increases, and both relationships are reversed after a certain threshold. We argue that under moderate levels of competition, universities tend to respond to local competition for students by differentiating their programmatic offerings from their competitors. However, when the level of competition is minimum or extreme, universities tend to follow an isomorphic strategy. After the reduction in student demand and the reform of the higher education system in 2008/2009, the relationship was no longer curvilinear because universities operating in extremely competitive environments began to adopt more risk-taking behaviour by engaging in diversification strategies.

Students’ mobility attitudes and sustainable transport mode choice

This study aims to explore the propensity of university students to use different sustainable transport modes, taking into account individual and specific trip characteristics, as well as students’ psychological traits (i.e. attitudes).,Using the transport mode preferences of 827 students who responded to a travel survey, a two-step analysis is conducted. The first step examines the effects of individual characteristics, travel experience and origin or destination features on students’ stated preferences (i.e. self-selected values assigned to personal attitudes). The second step analyses students’ travel mode choices, given their intrinsic mobility attitudes.,The results suggest that informing students about environmental issues increases their propensity to use sustainable mobility, leading to an average decrease in private transport usage of 5.8 per cent. Interestingly, improving the public transport service and promoting sustainable transport mobility have different impacts on individual campus areas. For campuses located in the city centre and in the historical hamlet, improvements in public transport are found to decrease solo driving by 3.3 per cent and 5.3 per cent, respectively. In suburban areas, this value increases to 9.5 per cent.,This work makes two contributions to the literature. First, it focuses on an unexplored setting, namely, that of a multi-campus university, with districts located in three different areas. This is used to explain how students are influenced by their travel experience and the cultural framework in which they are embedded. Second, the two-step analysis leads to a deeper understanding of the differences between attitudes and “intrinsic attitudes”, and their relative influence on the preferred alternative.