Value creation and related measurement in Universities. An empirical application

The growing normative, financial, organizational and didactic autonomy, which has interested the Italian Universities in the last ten years, has stimulated processes of monitoring, efficiency, efficacy and operational methods with which public resources are managed in each university. Moreover, the association between financial funds, with sustained costs and service’s quality, has strongly increased top management’s attention to costs reduction and, above all, to the final user’s satisfaction. In this new scenario, evaluation comes out to be the natural consequence of the strong universities’ autonomist pressure. Therefore the paper, after approaching universities’ structural and systemic assets, as well as their relationship with referring contest, analyses specific (related to the formative offer) and global university’s performances measurement methods and evaluation difficulties. The exposed theoretical analysis are completed with an empirical application about an Engineering degree course self-assessement