ALMALAUREA CONFERENCE 2006

The 8th Graduate Profile Report comes at a particularly interesting time for Italian universities. Of the 180,000 graduates from the class of 2005 investigated by AlmaLaurea, more than 81 thousand are first level graduates who completed the three-year degree introduced by the university reform, while the rest hold degrees based on the old university system. The profiles of these post-reform, first level graduates, make it possible to conduct significant checks on the state of progress of the university reform.

Thanks to the membership of a growing number of universities, the AlmaLaurea investigation contains a wealth of reliable and timely documentation. This is particularly useful to the Ministry for Education, Higher Education and Research (MUIR), to the National Committee for the Assessment of the University System (CNVSU), to university governing bodies and assessment committees, as well as to school principals and staff engaged in the delicate task of guidance into higher education. The assessments resulting from the agreement between MIUR(CNVSU) and ALMALAUREA are a valuable source of additional ideas for the analysis.

Aspects analysed

Based on the study of approximately one hundred different variables, the Report has produced up-to-date profiles for the 180,000 ALMALAUREA graduates who completed their degrees between 1st January and 31st December 2005. The 2006 edition of the Profile follows the structure adopted in previous years and is broken down into university, discipline, faculty, degree course/category, gender and type of graduate (worker-student, student-worker, student). In order to gain a better understanding of the state of progress of the reform, the analysis makes a further distinction between pure graduates (i.e. those who enrolled directly on a degree course offered by the reformed university) and hybrid graduates (i.e. former pre-reform students who subsequently transferred to a post-reform degree course).

Among the graduate characteristics investigated in the Report, the following are of particular interest:

• age at graduation and enrolment
• examination and graduation grades
• regularity of completion times and duration of academic study
• parents’ qualifications
• social class of the family
• type and grade of high school certificate
• regularity of class attendance
• study abroad periods
• training periods or in-house company training experiences
• time taken to complete thesis/final examination
• assessment of university experience
• sustainability of academic workload
• foreign language skills
• IT skills
• intention to pursue postgraduate study
• preferred employment sector
• characteristics of job aspired to.

For the first time, the survey also explores the following:

• student services provided by cities, universities and companies in connection with the right to education
• the job-seeking strategies that graduates intend to adopt.

The Ministry for Education, Higher Education and Research - Department of Education -, through its communication of 3rd May 2006 to the Managers of regional education offices and to school administration services and school principals, has given exemption from school service duties for the purpose of attending the AlmaLaurea Conference.