University Financial Sustainability: A comparison between Italy and other EU Countries (Part II: The Analysis)

The research defines the university financial sustainability as the interaction between three factors: the financial autonomy, the leverage, and the liquidity. In the first part of this research, they are translated in a series of warning indicators; now we define their “red flag” values, and we apply them to the 2007-2012 financial reports of Italian state universities. For each university, and each year, the paper calculates a synthetic financial sustainability indicator as the sum of the score reached by every single indicator. The results are compared among Italian universities and with EUA’s published studies. Results show that the medium-sized universities hold the lowest levels of financial sustainability. The small and very large universities have, on average, the higher levels in respect to the medium-sized ones.