The knowledge impact of new decentralized universities: an empirical study on Italy.

The geographical diffusion of universities has been recently incentivized in Europe by the growing relevance attributed to them as a driver of local development and as a source of learning for firms. However, the decision processes about the location of the new universities and the design of their study programs are not informed by any clear scientific guidelines. This paper assesses an aspect of the ‘knowledge impact’ of such phenomena by measuring the additional human capital produced, absorbed and coherently utilized by the local production systems in which the new universities have been created. Since universities do not track the location of their graduates in a systematic way, an original survey was conducted among all the graduates of twelve new decentralized universities in the Marches region. The analysis demonstrates that the geographical diffusion of new universities within the region produces a very small incremental contribution in terms of the overall production of graduates. We found diverging results concerning the specific cases and tested for the determinants of decentralized universities’ effectiveness in terms of their contributions to the local learning processes.