Many nations are adopting higher education strategies that emphasize the development of elite universities able to compete at the international level in the attraction of skills and resources. Elite universities pursue excellence in all their disciplines and fields of action. The impression is that this does not occur in "non-competitive" education systems, and that instead, within single universities excellent disciplines will coexist with mediocre ones. To test this, the authors measure research productivity in the hard sciences for all Italian universities over the period 2004-2008 at the levels of the institution, their individual disciplines and fields within them. The results show that the distribution of excellent disciplines is not concentrated in a few universities: top universities show disciplines and fields that are often mediocre, while generally mediocre universities will often include top disciplines.
Education, with the resulting new knowledge creation and transfer, is the lifeblood of socio-economic growth. Universities are thus a cornerstone of the knowledge-based society. The substantial proof of the essential role of research in innovation and growth (e.g. Adams, 1990;Rosenberg and Nelson, 1994;Mansfield, 1995;Griliches, 1998;Henderson et al., 1998) has clearly led many nations to invest in national scientific infrastructure and the higher education system. Such policies often pursue the development and strengthening of world-class universities (Mohrman et al., 2008;Deem et al., 2008), able to compete globally to attract talented students, faculty, and abundant funding. Salmi (2009) identified three possible strategies available to the decision maker who wishes to promote the birth of world-class universities:
i) Strengthen a small number of existing universities to bring them to excellent level (picking winners), a strategy recently adopted by the German federal government, which has organized a national competition to award substantial extra funding. ii) Stimulate fusion of a certain number of institutions (hybrid formula) -this strategy is seen in France and Denmark, where individual universities and grandes écoles are exploring the feasibility of regional mergers. iii) Create world-class universities from scratch (clean-slate approach)examples of this strategy are the series of Indian Institutes of Technologies, which implement a research policy agenda placing top priority on science and technology. Abramo et al. (2012) have proposed a fourth strategy, suggested particularly for undifferentiated non-competitive higher education systems: the spin-off of elite universities staffed with top scientists from existing ones. While it is obvious there is no universal recipe or magic formula for creating a world-class university, it is certainly possible to identify some of their characteristic features, such as high concentrations of talent, ample availability of resources and flexible models of governance. Yet in spite of attempts to define a vision and shared developmental strategy at the European Union level (EU Commission, 2003), the policies pursued by the member nations differ greatly from one another. Unlike certain other countries (with the United States and other “Anglo-Saxon” nations leading), the current situation in Europe is often one of excess public control, inefficient governance and chronic insufficiency of funds (Veugelers and Van der Ploeg, 2008). In the area of university governance, the OECD (2007) reveals that the most important driver of modernization in a university system is competition. The growth of world-class universities is favored by regulatory environments that introduce and permit competitive mechanisms for the stimulation of continuous improvement and the pursuit of competitive advantage. Aghion et al. (2009) show that universities’ performance is correlated with their autonomy and competitive environment. The level of competitiveness depends on cultural and other contextual factors, particularly the level of university autonomy, the type of financing and a government regulatory framework that is supportive in character. In competitive higher education systems, such as those observed in English speaking nations, the pursuit of competitive advantage has led to development of world-class universities that can attract, develop and retain highly-talented national and foreign faculty and students. The same institutions also obtain abundant public financing, private financing and donations, and attract venture capital and establishments of national and international high-tech companies in their territory, with resulting social and economic benefits. The competition factor has generated universities that are distinct in their quality of education and research, and thus in prestige, and that offer degrees and produce research results that also stand out for their social and market value. Mechanisms for stimulating competition can be varied in response to the context, but such competition will inevitably lead to more efficient selection and continuous improvement. These competitive mechanisms have developed quite naturally in the Anglo-Saxon nations, with long-standing evolution of national policies that favored the birth and development of a true higher-education market, while the excess of public control seen in many European nations has inhibited the initiation of true competitive mechanisms and led to the development of a generally undifferentiated higher education system that is unable to compete at a global level for access to economic and human resources (public and private funds; talented students, excellent faculty) (Auranen and Nieminen, 2010).
If the objective of government is to stimulate competition, and so lead to development of top universities that can compete internationally and produce the relevant socio-economic benefits, then some form of observation and mo
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