The Need for a Diversified Funding Model for Italian Universities. Perspectives to Promote Small Universities

This paper highlights the reasons why a single and not diversified funding model for all the State Universities is difficult to link to equity. It consequently suggests experimenting with models differentiated by dimensions, focusing, in particular, on small and medium universities, which are those which tend to show the most critical issues as to the policies of the last few years. The analysis is carried out according to a well-established scientific approach, based on the concept of information entropy, which arises in the information sciences and which, exploiting the analogy with thermodynamic systems, has proved particularly useful for the study of complex systems, even very different from one another, from physical-biological to economic-social fields. This paper applies the entropic approach to the distribution of students enrolled in Italian public Universities and allows to highlight how the small and medium Universities have a greater need to consider dissipative phenomena not occurring in the larger Universities. On the other hand, both the higher number of small and medium Universities, and their function particularly suited to match with the varied Italian social reality, require us to consider this condition as a peculiarity of the system, to be appropriately taken into account in the funding models.