Every 15 August, the Shanghai Ranking produces the same small collective ritual in Italy. People look at the top one hundred universities in the world, observe that there are no Italian universities among them, and immediately conclude that Italian universities are mediocre, provincial, and unable to compete.

What follows, with impressive regularity, are calls for meritocracy, competition, differentiation among universities, and the need to concentrate resources on the “best” institutions.

If, however, we analyse the data by moving beyond the childish logic of a sports league table, we obtain an almost opposite picture. In the 2026 Academic Ranking of World Universities, Italy has 42 institutions among the world’s top 1,000. Only China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany have more.

It is therefore clear that Italy has nothing comparable to Harvard, Stanford, or Cambridge. Nor could it be otherwise, given the historical and geopolitical context, economic and financial hegemony, the history of colonialism, and the global linguistic and cultural dominance of the Anglo-American world.

Nevertheless, Italy has an extraordinarily high number of universities capable of positioning themselves within the upper tier of global research.

The point, therefore, is not that Italy has too few excellent universities, but that it has a broadly strong university system that does not concentrate its scientific capital in a few gigantic institutions. Unfortunately, Shanghai is not designed to capture this.

What Does Shanghai Really Measure?

Before using a ranking, we should ask what exactly it ranks. The ARWU was established in 2003 at Shanghai Jiao Tong University with a very specific purpose: to measure how far Chinese universities were from the major US research universities.

It was therefore not created on the basis of a universal theory of what constitutes a good university. Rather, it emerged as an instrument of Chinese public policy and was constructed around a specific historical and institutional model: the large Anglo-American research university.

Its criteria are consistent with this objective. They reward Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited researchers, publications in Nature and Science, indexed scientific output, and research performance in relation to institutional size.

Shanghai therefore does not measure teaching quality, the right to education, a university’s ability to promote social mobility, or the territorial coverage of the higher education system. Nor does it measure professional training, the civic role of universities, their contribution to the development of peripheral areas, or the reduction of territorial inequalities.

It was designed to measure the institutional concentration of internationally visible scientific capital. There is nothing inherently problematic about this. Every indicator selects a portion of reality. The problem arises when that portion is transformed into reality itself.

The Italian Paradox

If we look at Shanghai from the perspective of individual institutions, Italy appears weak because it has no universities in the Top 100. If, instead, we look at the distribution of the system as a whole, a different landscape emerges.

Forty-two Italian universities are among the world’s top 1,000. In other words, a very large proportion of the national higher education system is strong enough to position itself within the international tier selected by a ranking that, moreover, uses criteria that are particularly unfavourable to its institutional organisation.

This should at least prompt a question.

How does a country that invests relatively little in higher education, whose universities are on average much smaller than the large international scientific conglomerates, and which lacks the linguistic, financial, and geopolitical power of the Anglo-Saxon world manage to maintain such a widespread presence in global research?

The answer should encourage a degree of caution before diagnosing the failure of Italian universities. The reality is that the system may not be inefficient at all, but rather extraordinarily productive in relation to the resources available to it.

Italy’s problem does not seem to be a lack of quality, but rather the difficulty of transforming widely distributed quality into concentrated institutional power.

These are two completely different problems.

France Understood This

The French experience is instructive, and we presented it to policymakers as early as 2009 in Corradi, F. (ed.), 2009, Alla ricerca dell'eccellenza: le politiche per l'eccellenza nell'istruzione superiore in quattro paesi europei [In Search of Excellence: Policies for Excellence in Higher Education in Four European Countries], LED.

When the first Shanghai rankings produced results that were considered disappointing, France did not simply instruct individual universities to compete more effectively with one another. It made a specific political choice: to change the institutional scale of competition.

Starting in 2007, French governments encouraged mergers, groupings, federations, and large scientific hubs. The fragmentation of French research among universities, grandes écoles, and major national organisations – CNRS, Inserm, CEA, and others – made the country’s actual scientific capacity far less visible in international rankings.

Paris-Saclay is the most striking example. The institution that Shanghai now consistently places among the world’s leading universities is not simply the French equivalent of Sapienza, Bologna, or Padua. It is the result of concentrating universities, grandes écoles, laboratories, and research organisations within a common institutional architecture.

One can debate at length whether it makes sense to reorganise a university system partly in response to a ranking. Personally, I believe there is something deeply absurd about allowing a ranking to contribute to reshaping the institutional architecture of knowledge.

But at least the French approach was a strategy. France understood that, if competition is global, a state cannot simply make its own institutions compete against one another. It must build the overall capacity of the system. In other words, it played the Shanghai game using the tools of public policy.

Italy Did the Opposite

Over the same period, Italy followed an almost opposite direction. For around twenty-five years, Italian higher education policy has been shaped by the idea that the main problem facing universities is insufficient competition among institutions.

Thus, the academic proponents of market-oriented reform – you may remember Giavazzi and Ichino, to name just a few – called for competitive autonomy, evaluation, performance-based allocations within the Ordinary Financing Fund (FFO), performance indicators, increasing differentiation among institutions, incentives for students to move towards universities considered better, and competition for staff and funding.

The underlying paradigm is that of a quasi-market in higher education. The belief of these would-be sorcerers is that, if resources were distributed according to results, the best universities would grow, the weaker ones would be forced to improve, and the system as a whole would become more efficient.

On the basis of this paradigm, they also called for the liberalisation of university tuition fees, placing greater pressure on the middle classes.

But this theory leaves out one crucial element: universities do not compete under equal starting conditions at the national level.

If you reward a university for its ability to attract students from other regions, you also reward its geographical location. If you reward it for graduate employment, you are introducing differences between regional labour markets into university funding.

If you reward an institution’s ability to obtain competitive research funding in a system where doing so requires administrative structures, personnel, and initial resources, you inevitably introduce cumulative mechanisms.

This produces a classic Matthew effect, in which advantage generates resources, resources generate performance, and performance generates new resources.

Competing with Harvard?

This is where the most surreal aspect of the Italian strategy emerges. We have tried to import the Anglo-Saxon competitive model without possessing almost any of the conditions that make it possible.

Large American universities operate within a global geopolitical space dominated by the United States, use the lingua franca of global science, attract students and researchers from across the planet, possess enormous endowments, benefit from private philanthropy and very high tuition fees, and, above all, receive enormous amounts of public research funding.

Oxford and Cambridge operate within the same global linguistic space and benefit from an ability to attract talent that has been built up over centuries.

To think that an Italian university can simply be placed “in competition” with these institutions through a few additional points in the performance-based component of the FFO means confusing the rhetoric of competition with an analysis of the material conditions that shape it.

It is like organising a Formula One race by giving the competitors family cars and explaining to them that competitive pressure will spontaneously turn them into Ferraris, simply by giving the best performers a little more fuel.

Italy’s Real Asset Is the System

There is, however, an even more serious consequence. A policy centred on competition risks destroying precisely what makes the Italian case distinctive: the territorial distribution of scientific capacity.

Rome, Bologna, Padua, Milan, Turin, Pisa, Naples, Florence, Pavia, Trento, Bari, Catania, Genoa, Cagliari, and many other centres constitute a relatively geographically distributed network of knowledge production.

This structure clearly has its limitations. But it also possesses enormous public value.

A university does not produce only papers, but also doctors, teachers, engineers, magistrates, administrators, professionals, and researchers. It trains local elites. It supports hospitals, schools, public administrations, and businesses. It constitutes one of the few major mechanisms through which cultural capital circulates nationally.

A strong university in Cagliari, Bari, Palermo, or Cosenza is not an inefficient duplicate of Milan; it is a national infrastructure.

Public policy should not seek to identify our “best” university and throw it into the arena with the giants. It should instead work towards building a university system capable of safeguarding Italy’s national interest.

From Competition to Cooperation

This does not mean distributing resources regardless of results, nor does it mean defending every existing arrangement.

It means changing the unit of analysis.

Instead of organising a permanent distributive war among universities, policies could be developed around large national scientific networks, territorial alliances, shared infrastructures, federated doctoral programmes, common technological platforms, structured researcher mobility, national access to major research facilities, complementary specialisations, and regional university hubs.

Competition can exist within a cooperative system, but it should be politically designed rather than left to the economic reductionism that drives the current phase of pseudo-reformism.

France and Germany, using very different instruments, have at least maintained this awareness: international competition requires national capacity for aggregation.

Italy has too often transformed international competition into internal competition. This is a strategy that risks becoming self-defeating.

The Reformist Scorpion and the University Frog

For twenty-five years, we have continued to tell ourselves that Italian universities need to be reformed because they are not sufficiently similar to a model that we cannot materially reproduce.

In the meantime, we reduce or constrain resources, increase distributive competition, differentiate institutions, deepen territorial divides, and then use the consequences of this differentiation as evidence that further differentiation is necessary.

This is the logic of the Scorpion and the Frog: a reformist scorpion whose very nature is to kill the university system on which it exercises its pseudo-reformist imagination. See, in this regard, the recent book by Cappa and Gavosto, L’università sotto esame (Il Mulino, 2025).

Despite the repeated stings of the reformist scorpion, the Italian university system continues to produce internationally recognised research and to maintain a geographical distribution of quality that many other systems do not possess.

Instead of asking how we can strengthen this distinctive characteristic, we continue trying to transform it into something else.

Paradoxically, Shanghai could help us reverse the diagnosis.

Ultimately, let us leave fools to argue about why no Italian university is like Harvard and instead try to understand how forty-two Italian universities manage to rank among the world’s top 1,000, despite the conditions under which they are forced to operate.

At this point, we can decide whether we want to use this strength to build a national knowledge system or continue to undermine it through internal competition among structurally underfunded institutions.

The first is a higher education policy; the second is a culturally impoverished and politically subordinate form of pseudo-reformism that tries to play the Shanghai game without understanding the rules.