Which university to choose after graduation? Does the future really belong to online universities?

Among the uncertainties that beset students and parents is the choice of which university to attend after graduation. There is, in fact, more than one doubt about the actual validity of the qualifications provided by online universities. This was confirmed by an investigation by the television program Report, broadcast on 28 April. But the doubts are older: this is demonstrated by an article in La Tecnica dated 2013, relating to the study commission to which the then Minister of Education Maria Chiara Carrozza gave the task of ruling on the matter. It was a question of understanding – our Pasquale Almirante wrote at the time – «how much a degree obtained through online universities is really worth, given that from a legal point of view it is equivalent to degrees obtained in traditional state and non-state universities. But from the learning point of view is it the same thing?”

They cost more, teach less, but produce equivalent qualifications

The question was already answered in the negative then, due to the “difficulty/impossibility of attending the laboratories”, the doubts about the recognition of credits and the lack of staff. And the answer came from the CNVSU (National Committee for the Evaluation of the University System, later replaced by ANVUR, National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research System).
An investigation by the newspaper Repubblica on March 17th screamed, under the title “The factory of easy degrees”: «Eleven online universities, over 140,000 more students in ten years: for many under 23s they are the first post-diploma choice. It matters little if the recognized quality is lower than traditional universities. Born 20 years ago, they have financed and served (centre-right) politics, enriching cumbersome bosses with fees of 4,000 euros per student. And simplified the path for those asking for a legal title. Now they are raising their voices: “We want equal dignity”.

Who will pay the price for the damage caused by less trained professionals?

On 10 April in the Sole 24 Ore we read that «In Italy 13% of graduates come from online universities» (in a country with a very low number of graduates). According to the Confindustria newspaper this would happen “without burdening public accounts (because the resources come from the fees paid by students)”. True in theory; less true if we calculate the social cost of the possible unpreparedness of future professionals: engineers, doctors, teachers, lawyers, magistrates, economists, diplomats and so on. Yes, because the degree should not be a simple – albeit highly coveted – “piece of paper”.

If the security is a commodity that produces economic profit to those who sell it

Report’s investigation of 28 April had as its title “The piece of paper”: it examined the market of telematic universities and its connections with political funding, which in turn was generous in recognizing the legal status of the telematic universities themselves and their equivalence with traditional (and public) universities. The (private) profits of online universities would be reinvested – at least in part – for purposes not always related to culture: for example, for the purchase of football teams, or to finance electoral campaigns.

Public money to private online universities to train public employees

The current minister of public administration Paolo Zangrillo has extended to online universities the possibility for public administration personnel to graduate according to the 2021 “PA 110 cum laude” agreement: on the basis of which the State will pay private university universities a large part of the fees that public employees will have to spend for training. Some of these universities belong to foreign (British, for example) investment firms.
Meanwhile, the so-called “baskets” are selling like hotcakes (for a fee) on the web: repertoires of answers to the questions needed to pass exams at online universities. Business probably illegal, but very widespread, in broad daylight. Who cares about the quality of the preparation certified by the resulting “pieces of paper”?

If only the “piece of paper” counts

Meanwhile, online universities, to increase profits, hire few teachers. Too few. In traditional universities there is on average one professor for every 28 students; one in every 385 in telematics. Where is the quality of teaching in such a situation? Especially if we consider the desirable standard (that of the best universities in the world): one for every nine to ten students.
This is, in fact, one of the reasons why ANVUR reports assign high marks to traditional state universities, and very low marks to private online ones.

The social pedagogy of the Land of Pinocchio

The question arises spontaneously: does the current political and managerial class of this country treat higher education as a business? or do we really care, how should we care (and worry) about an institution with a strategic priority for the present and future of our nation?
If the picture is actually the one documented by journalistic investigations (and institutional reports), isn’t it perhaps legitimate to suspect that Italian social pedagogy is not inspired by collective interest? Isn’t it perhaps consistent with this social pedagogy that school teachers continue to be the lowest paid graduates in Italy (with salaries similar to those of ecological workers)? And that the same teachers, public officials in the exercise of their duties, are beaten and insulted without the school directors automatically reporting these attacks? Should we perhaps doubt that Carlo Collodi, in describing the city of Acchiappa-citrulli, was thinking of the Italian State?