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EDUCATION

Rome’s La Sapienza ranked best university in Italy

La Sapienza in Rome has risen in the annual rankings to be named 'best in Italy' once again.

Published: 19 August 2019 10:58 CEST
Rome's La Sapienza ranked best university in Italy
A statue of Roman goddess of wisdom, Minerva, in front of Rome's La Sapienza University. File photo: Filippo Monteforte/AFP

The 2019 edition of the prestigious annual Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), by independent research organisation Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, named La Sapienza as Italy’s top university.

The ranking is based on criteria including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals and the number of highly-cited researchers.

The top 30 places in the international table were dominated by US and UK universities, with the top three places once again taken by Harvard, Stanford and Cambridge.

The highest ranking universities in Europe included ETH Zurich (in 19th place) and the University of Copenhagen (26th).

Rome came much further behind in 153rd place, closely followed by Italy’s University of Pisa and the Statale di Milano.

But it’s an improvement on last year’s ranking, where La Sapienza fell into the 201-300 range

The 2019 ranking was described by La Sapienza president Eugenio Gaudio as a “remarkable leap forward.”

ARWU ranks the world’s top 1,800 universities – out of a total of 17,000 – publishing an annual list of the top 1,000.

A total of 46 Italian universities feature in the 2019 ARWU ranking.

Another international ranking released in June 2019 also put La Sapienza in the top spot, while an Italian survey last month ranked Bologna’s historic campus as the best large university in the country. 

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EDUCATION

Sweden’s Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

Sweden's opposition Social Democrats have called for a total ban on the establishment of new profit-making free schools, in a sign the party may be toughening its policies on profit-making in the welfare sector.

Published: 18 April 2024 16:09 CEST
Sweden's Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

“We want the state to slam on the emergency brakes and bring in a ban on establishing [new schools],” the party’s leader, Magdalena Andersson, said at a press conference.

“We think the Swedish people should be making the decisions on the Swedish school system, and not big school corporations whose main driver is making a profit.” 

Almost a fifth of pupils in Sweden attend one of the country’s 3,900 primary and secondary “free schools”, first introduced in the country in the early 1990s. 

Even though three quarters of the schools are run by private companies on a for-profit basis, they are 100 percent state funded, with schools given money for each pupil. 

This system has come in for criticism in recent years, with profit-making schools blamed for increasing segregation, contributing to declining educational standards and for grade inflation. 

In the run-up to the 2022 election, Andersson called for a ban on the companies being able to distribute profits to their owners in the form of dividends, calling for all profits to be reinvested in the school system.  

READ ALSO: Sweden’s pioneering for-profit ‘free schools’ under fire 

Andersson said that the new ban on establishing free schools could be achieved by extending a law banning the establishment of religious free schools, brought in while they were in power, to cover all free schools. 

“It’s possible to use that legislation as a base and so develop this new law quite rapidly,” Andersson said, adding that this law would be the first step along the way to a total ban on profit-making schools in Sweden. 

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